THE INVITE – Review by Susan Granger

I’m glad I waited to see The Invite on Prime Video because – while Olivia Wilde helms this forebodingly unpredictable sex comedy – it’s not worth a trip to the multiplex. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from the Spanish film Sentimental (2020), it’s basically a four-hander, set in San Francisco. What happens is for you to discover – as all four actors play their parts convincingly. Reminiscent of but not nearly as good as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it’s yet another deep dive into a tense, troubled, middle-age marriage.

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THE INVITE – Review by T.J. Callahan

If you like edgy dinner parties that promise the possibility of sex, drugs and a rock n roll of emotions, then make sure you RSVP for The Invite. Olivia Wilde directs herself, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz in this relationship dramady that will leave you evaluating your own partnership. The film takes place in the living room of the San Francisco apartment of Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Rogen). They’ve invited their rather lively upstairs neighbors, Hawk and Pina (Norton and Cruz), over for dinner, but when the party spirals into unexpected places, Angela and Joe don’t know if they’ve reignited the spark in their troubled marriage or lit the flame that burns it down.

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BREAKDOWN: 1975 – Review by Lynn Venhaus

In this Wayback Machine, called Breakdown: 1975, we travel back 50 years to a pivotal year that defined daring, imaginative filmmaking, and how coincidentally, it happened between the resignation of President Nixon and the Bicentennial birthday celebration. In Morgan Neville’s well-intentioned documentary, he puts the chaotic 1970s in perspective, touching on how young talented filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg were inspiring a cinematic revolution. Studios took risks, and moviegoers responded in this heralded New Hollywood. As exuberant as this fertile time was, in real life, America was going through dismal days post-Watergate and Vietnam.

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THE STUDIO – Review by Susan Granger

Ever wanted to sneak behind-closed-doors and see what propels the Hollywood Dream Machine? That’s what happens in the cameo-cluttered, 10-episode satire The Studio, skewering the perennial Art-vs-Commerce dilemma. When delusional dreamer Matt Remick (co-creator Seth Rogen) becomes the head of Continental Studios , he’s told by CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) that his job is to make IP-driven movies that will succeed at the box-office, not “artsy-fartsy films.” Problem is: pretentious cinephile Matt thinks he can do both

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DUMB MONEY (TIFF 2023) – Review by Rachel West

The year is 2020. Confined to the insides of their homes and glued to the internet for lack of anything better to do during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one YouTube live streamer and an army of Reddit investors pushed hedge fund billionaires to the brink in the infamous GameStop Wall Street scandal. Less than three years after the real-life event, director Craig Gillespie and writers Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo bring Dumb Money, the true story of the scandal that pitted average armchair investors – so-called “dumb money” — against hedge fund managers through a grassroots investing movement.

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PAM & TOMMY – Review by Pam Grady

Pam & Tommy is tabloid television given an elegant veneer by its A-list cast and the fig leaf of feminism offered by the women on the production team and women like Lake Bell who direct some of the episodes. But nearly 30 years after all of this first started, this show is really just the latest chapter in the ongoing exploitation of Pamela Anderson, a woman who does not deserve it.

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LONG SHOT – Review by Brandy McDonnell

Screenwriters Dan Sterling (“The Interview” with Rogen) and Liz Hannah (“The Post”) provide the just-right mix of the sweet and raunchy humor that made Rogen famous, while also balancing the romantic and political aspects of the comedy. It’s refreshing to actually laugh about politics for a while. It’s also bracing to see a romantic comedy free of most of the misogyny and plot machinations that have long plagued the cinematic subgenre.

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