The Invite (2026)

Jack and I loved this cringey, profane story of a tense couple, whose marriage is on the rocks, and their dinner party with a couple in their building. Several others of our friends loved it, too. Olivia Wilde directs and stars as the tightly wound wife in couple #1 with Seth Rogen as her baffled husband. When gorgeous couple #2, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, enters the picture it gets even more crazy.

Will McCormack and Rashida Jones adapted the screenplay from the Spanish movie 2020 movie Sentimental AKA The People Upstairs. Devonté Hynes' jittery original score can be streamed on Apple Music. Wikipedia says he plays cello, among other instruments, and that is primary in this score.

A few fun trivia tidbits: Wilde dedicated the movie to her mentor Diane Keaton, who died three months before the movie's Sundance Film Festival release; it opens with a quotation from Oscar Wilde, who is no relation to the director (her birth name is Olivia Jane Cockburn); and this is the seventh adaptation of Sentimental (I counted more than the imdb trivia), all in other languages.

Wilde was last blogged for directing and acting in Don't Worry Darling, Rogen for Dumb Money, Cruz for Ferrari, Norton for A Complete Unknown, the writing team of McCormack and Jones for Celeste and Jesse Forever, and Hynes for Passing. 

Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences have RSVPed yes, please, with averages of 96 and 89%, respectively. We rented it on August 11.