Thoughts on The Invite

     At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw The Invite, a 2026 dramedy directed by Olivia Wilde and co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones. It is an English-language remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs (Sentimental), and stars Wilde and Seth Rogen as Angela and Joe, a couple living in San Francisco whose marriage is on the rocks, and Angela invites over a neighbor couple, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for dinner and drinks.

    Joe is a jazz band teacher at a local conservatory, and used to be in a 2000s pop-punk band that had one hit song before flaming out, and he's felt bitter about not being more successful and working at a low-rate music school, as well as living in the large apartment that he grew up in because he can't afford to move out. Angela is a stay-at-home mother to their twelve-year-old daughter Maggie (who is away at a friend's house the entire night), and she is nervous and anxious and wants to impress the glamourous couple with her decorating taste and make friends with them. Joe can't stand them because he doesn't like it when Hawk tries to make small talk with him in the elevator, and that during the night, Joe and Angela frequently hear loud sex coming from Hawk and Piña's apartment right above their home. Joe wants to confront them about it, while Angela is adamant that he not bring it up as not to cause a fight.

    Joe and Angela have a lot of tension between them, which is obvious to Hawk and Piña when they arrive, saying they could hear them arguing from outside the door. Hawk is a retired firefighter, while Piña is a psychotherapist. There are a lot of awkward mistakes, like Joe forgetting to buy wine and Angela scrambling to use a spare bottle of wine saved for an anniversary, and Angela trying to impress the Spanish Piña with serving her jamon, only for Piña to say that she is vegan, gluten-free, and sugar-free. Joe is often sarcastic and antagonizes the couple, only for Hawk to appreciate his honesty and push for him to be more blunt and open with them.

    The night unfolds more as the couples share secrets and insecurities and their pasts, and the movie gets really funny and messy and loud, and it's really enjoyable to watch. Olivia Wilde was really hilarious with physical comedy as Angela, doing a lot of "looks" to Joe when she's annoyed with him, or making a "see, I was right" face when the other couple agrees with her on something. Edward Norton gets a really touching monologue scene in the last third when he talks about his past relationship with his wife before he met Piña, and Penélope Cruz was really funny in often cutting through people's bullshit, like being annoyed when Hawk tries to correct her English in front of company and telling him he doesn't speak Spanish well and she lets it slide. Seth Rogen was good, though I didn't really believe him and Olivia Wilde in portraying a long-term couple, feeling like she would have broken up with him long before and not just staying together for their daughter.

    The first ten minutes of the movie had a loud score by Devonté Hynes of screeching cello music to emphasize the tension between Joe and Angela as she prepares for the neighbors visiting, and I thought the score was overkill and practically drowning out the actors, it didn't feel necessary, though the music calmed down after that.

    I liked that the film felt like a contemporary version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with the visiting couple being older and with past marriages instead of being young newlyweds, who are able to see the anger and resentment in Joe and Angela's marriage and give them words of wisdom from life experience. The film was mature and funny, and not just frank about sex, but about love and relationships and complications with life changes and growing together or growing apart. I think that Olivia Wilde, given her hit with directing Booksmart and her flop with directing Don't Worry, Darling, excels much more with comedy than she does with melodrama, and this film played more to her talents as an actor and director.

Thoughts on Christine

     On Criterion, I watched Christine, a 1983 supernatural horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by Bill Phillips, based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. The film starred Keith Gordon as Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy high school senior who purchases a 1958 Plymouth car for $250 and becomes obsessed with it, naming it Christine, as the car is possessed by an evil spirit and kills anyone who she sees as a threat to her and Arnie.

    The film opens with the car being produced in a Detroit auto plant in 1957 (with the anachronistic choice of George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" playing over the prologue), and maiming one worker by slamming its hood on his fingers, and killing another worker because he dropped cigar ash on its seat.    

    In 1978 California, teenage Arnie is bullied on his first day of school by Buddy (William Ostrander) and his gang, and Arnie's best friend Dennis (John Stockwell) intervenes and saves him, and Buddy is later expelled for threatening them with a switchblade. After school, Arnie and Buddy are driving home when Arnie sees the car, now in a beat-up state, and wants to buy it from an elderly, rough around the edges man (Roberts Blossom), the brother of the previous owner, who recently died. Despite Dennis' protests, Arnie buys the car, and his parents are mad that he at 17 made a big move like that without consulting them, and he blows up at them over wanting to keep him a sheltered nerd. He takes Christine to a garage to restore her, where the garage owner Will Darnell (Robert Prosky) gives him a part-time job in exchange for letting him have access to his junk pile to fix Christine.

    Arnie is in love with his car, and his newfound confidence gets him a date with the new girl, Leigh (Alexandra Paul), who Dennis and his friends are immediately smitten by, and Dennis' friends make lewd sexual comments about her on first sight. Leigh and Arnie begin dating seriously, and Dennis, distracted by seeing them kissing by Christine while he's playing a football game, gets tackled so severely that he ends up in the hospital for a month and it ends his football career.

    Christine and Arnie have a co-dependent abusive relationship, where Christine is insanely jealous and possessive of Arnie and will kill people by running them over/pinning them to a wall or asphyxiating someone while keeping the doors locked, and Arnie becomes combative and verbally abusive to his parents, Dennis, and Leigh, emboldened with toxic masculinity after being a bullied nerd for so long.

    I liked how effective the characterization of the car was in the movie, how Christine would only play 1950s rock songs that expressed its emotions in a scene ("We Belong Together"; "Bony Maronie"; "Come on, Let's Go"), bringing an eerie, creepy feel to the songs, and the special effects when Christine regenerates herself after being destroyed were fantastic, through hydraulics crumpling the car and puckering in, then the film played in reverse to show the car "fixing" herself. I especially liked a sequence where, after Christine starts a fire at a gas station and kills two people while gunning to kill the main bully, the car is fully engulfed in flames and being driven by stunt veteran Terry Leonard, who had doubled for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark around that time.

    I liked this movie a lot, mostly for the special effects and the personification of the car as the villain, as well as the depiction of the bullied nerd becoming a horrible person and his best friend and girlfriend becoming the heroes of the film. It's a really interesting and haunting film of the 1980s.

Thoughts on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

     On Hulu I watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, a 2025 sci-fi comedy directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Matthew Robinson. It was decent, but overly long at two hours and 15 minutes, it should've been a tight 90 minutes. It did get hamfisted with the "everyone's on their phones" stuff, but I liked the basic premise of Sam Rockwell as a time traveler from the future who is trying to prevent AI from taking over the world, and he has time-traveled to the same Norm's diner in L.A. 117 times to find the right combination of patrons in the diner to join him on his quest to stop the AI apocalypse from happening. It's like Terminator 2 if it was more of a goofy comedy and less about Sarah Connor trying to kill the creator of Skynet in front of his family.

    The film has a good cast with Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson, Zazie Beetz, and Michael Peña as some of the diner patrons picked for the mission, with their own backstories told in flashback about their experiences with technology and AI, and the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network described their backstories as being in their own Black Mirror episodes. Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña play a teacher couple whose students are always on their phones in class and ignore the teachers; Juno Temple plays a woman whose teen son dies in a school shooting and other mothers of school shooting victims lead her to a place where they can clone her son, albeit more like a physical copy than having his same personality; and Haley Lu Richardson plays a woman who is allergic to cell phones and WiFi and gets nosebleeds around them, and her boyfriend, who once was against cell phones, gets addicted to a VR headset and wants to live in virtual reality than the real world. Their stories are all pretty interesting, especially the one with Juno Temple's character, and I did prefer their backstories to the main plot thread, which feels like too many plot ideas thrown in at once.

Thoughts on Wild at Heart

     On Criterion, I watched Wild at Heart, a 1990 Southern Gothic crime film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, two young lovers who, after Sailor is released from prison for having murdered a man in self-defense, go on the run from Lula's domineering mother Marietta (Diane Ladd), who has hired hitmen to kill Sailor. 

    Nicolas Cage brings out his Elvis Presley impersonations as Sailor, as a romantic outlaw who sings Presley ballads to his girlfriend but says he will only sing "Love Me Tender" to his future wife, and does high kicks and punching the air while dancing. Laura Dern brought out a more sexual side as Lula, a young woman of twenty who is a survivor of sexual assault as a child and has a passionate excitement for Sailor, even after he bludgeoned a man to death (initially in self-defense because Marietta sent him to kill him, but then going beyond into a murderous rage) and acts jealous and threatening towards a guy at a rock show for dancing with Lula.

    Diane Ladd plays up soap opera theatrics as Marietta, painting red lipstick all over her face and being in hysterics over the phone, seeing Sailor as dangerous for her daughter, but she is also involved with hitmen and gangsters, and was complicit with the death of her husband. 

    Sailor and Lula travel together from North Carolina to California, breaking his parole, driving in a convertible and stop in Texas along the way, where Sailor meets up with an old acquaintance, Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini), and he doesn't know that she knows that there is a contract out on him, and that she is linked up with Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), a slimy criminal with rancid teeth.

    The movie is a weird and wild mess, but really captivating to watch. Cage and Dern bring a lot of raw sexuality and passion to their love scenes, and their characters' relationship has a romantic "us against the world" feel to it, that amazingly doesn't end in flames. 

    The film is stacked with character actors: Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover (in a tragic flashback story as Lula's cousin who is struggling with psychosis issues and breaks with reality), J.E. Freeman, Jack Nance, W. Morgan Sheppard, Grace Zabriskie, David Patrick Kelly, Frances Bay, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and others. There's an early role by Sheryl Lee the same year she played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks as a hallucination of Glinda the Good Witch, and Sherilyn Fenn, also from Twin Peaks, played a traumatized survivor of a car accident with brain damage who succumbs to her injuries.

    The film has a lot of references to The Wizard of Oz, with Lula clicking her red heels to want to escape a traumatic situation; the Glinda hallucination; Lula picturing her mother as the Wicked Witch of the West; referring to the road they traveled on as the yellow brick road, and other mentions. It goes along with the fantasy of the film, of being this weird road trip/romance/Southern Gothic movie, playing Elvis Presley songs and briefly the intro of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" in one scene.

    Isabella Rossellini had a lot of glamour with her blonde wig and dark unibrow as Perdita, but the role would be better known when played by Rosie Perez in 1997's Dance with the Devil (also known as Perdita Durango). The character was from the novel and from Barry Gifford's 1992 novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango. In Rossellini's 1997 memoir Some of Me, she said that she based the look of Perdita on Frida Kahlo:

    "For my character, Perdita Durango, I used Frida Kahlo, whose paintings are a series of obsessive self-portraits. Frida Kahlo portrayed herself as attractive and repulsive at the same time. She is beautiful and feminine, but she is hairy, a bit like an ape, with a mustache and two eyebrows that are really one big one across her forehead. This combination of attractiveness/repulsiveness fascinated me . . . I used a bad blond wig that exposed black roots and a tight dress, sexy but vulgar. I changed my body posture and I added hair so I, too, could have one eyebrow across my forehead. My Perdita, I believe, conveyed the impression of a person who is repulsive and attractive at the same time . . . Perdita is my best example of modeling skills applied to acting."

    But Willem Dafoe was the scene-stealer as Bobby Peru, a truly disgusting person who sexually threatens and assaults Lula, triggering her childhood rape, and whom Sailor joins in a robbery, against his better judgment. Dafoe is fantastic in this film and utterly memorable.

    I really liked this film. I hadn't seen it since I was a teenager, and barely remembered it aside from the main romance and Lula's line to Sailor, "You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt." I liked revisiting it and understanding it better and taking it all in, and enjoying the weird ride of it all.

Thoughts on Delicatessen

    On Tubi, I watched Delicatessen, a 1991 French black comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, and co-written by Jeunet, Caro, and Gilles Adrien. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic France, possibly during the 1950s, focusing on the tenants of a dilapidated apartment building. Food is in short supply, and grain is used as currency. The landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) works as a butcher in his shop on the first floor, and posts job opportunities for handymen, so he can lure unsuspecting men to his building and butcher them and sell them to his tenants as cheap meat.

    The next applicant for the vacant position is the circus clown Louison (Dominique Pinon), who is handy with fixing things around the building and has a trick knife/boomerang he calls the "Australian." Clapet is reluctant to murder him so soon because of his usefulness, and he develops a cute romance with Clapet's daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). The other tenants know they are eating people and are resigned to it for survival, but like Louison too for his charms.

    I first saw this movie as a teenager in the 1990s, and really liked how bizarre and weird it is. The film has a yellow and sepia-toned look to it, making the colors look like vomit, with a lot of wide angle shots and exaggerations and cartoonish humor, like with a group of underground mole people who come into the last third of the movie and take over the film. There's a fun sequence of simultaneous noises like the bed squeaking from sex, Julie playing the cello with her bow, and other tapping sounds as a calamity of sounds, with credit to the sound designer and editor. There's an ongoing joke of one of the tenants trying to die by suicide with elaborate Rube Goldberg setups (like sitting in the bathtub beside a sewing machine attached to a string attached to other things attached to a doorbell in hopes that her lover will ring the buzzer triggering the action to kill her). I love the date scene where Julie is preparing to mime pouring tea for Louison and practicing what to say, and when she tries to do the date without her glasses and Louison has to keep saving her from overpouring the tea and catching her mistakes because of her nearsighted blurry vision. It's an oddball movie that works really well with the vision that Jeunet and Caro put forth. 

    The two would collaborate again on 1995's The City of Lost Children, before parting on their separate creative ways, with Jeunet becoming the more well-known name with directing 1997's Alien: Resurrection, 2001's Amelie and 2004's A Very Long Engagement. Marc Caro has worked as an art director, often collaborating with Jan Kounen on his films.

    I love how creative and beautiful and strange this film is, and the romance between Louison and Julie is so sweet and cute amidst the madness. I'm really glad I revisited this film and understood it a lot better in my older age.

Thoughts on Felicia's Journey

     On Criterion, I watched the 1999 psychological thriller film Felicia's Journey, written and directed by Atom Egoyan, based on the 1994 novel of the same name by William Trevor. The film centers on two lonely people: Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), an Irish teenager who goes to Birmingham, England to find her boyfriend Johnny; and Joseph (Bob Hoskins), a Birmingham catering manager who is the son of a French TV chef from decades past. 

    Felicia is pregnant, and her boyfriend Johnny (Peter McDonald) has gone to join the British Army, being seen as a traitor to Ireland by Felicia's widower father. Johnny's mother looks down on Felicia, and her father opposes the relationship, encouraging her to forget Johnny and find another guy. But Felicia is young and idealistic, and doesn't get how Johnny isn't serious about her (he ignores her when he talks to a friend, not introducing her, and he doesn't leave a forwarding address, claiming he'll write her when he gets there). So she travels to Birmingham, with barely any identification, and only has the barest information that Johnny was in the army and works at a lawnmower factory, but doesn't know what factory. She's wandering around on her own, and meets Joseph, a local who offers her directions but is often on his way to visit his ailing wife in the hospital. At home, Joseph cooks meals while watching his mother's 1950s-era cooking TV shows, connecting with his mother through that way instead of in his actual childhood, when she would make him eat raw liver on TV and be annoyed at him coughing and gagging. Joseph is kind and reserved and polite, but harbors a lot of trauma inside from his childhood and living in the house he grew up in.

    As Felicia struggles more to find Johnny, she is approached by a representative of a Christian group and given shelter by them, but they prove to be hypocritical and self-righteous. She gets accosted by men at night on the street, going "Are you working?", assuming she's a sex worker. She ends up staying with Joseph, but he has his own unsettling past with helping vulnerable young women like herself.

    I really enjoyed this film. I like how Atom Egoyan's films are often quiet Canadian dramas that are slow and focus on character studies of lonely people, like in The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, and how the film slowly unveils itself to be a thriller without the Hollywood markings of loud music or jump scares. I like how the film largely takes place during the day, in mundane parts of Birmingham, and the horror more creeps up on the viewer, when Joseph seems like a nice, unassuming person until more of his past is revealed. And that Felicia is a good and innocent person who wants to believe that Johnny cares for her, and it takes her a long time to realize that he has abandoned her.

    Both lead actors are fantastic in this film. Bob Hoskins, who was largely known for playing rough, working-class characters in both British and American films, brought a quiet sensitivity to this role, and it was one of the best performances of his career. And Elaine Cassidy, early in her career, brought a sweet shyness and naivete to her role that made her character nearly feel tragic.

    I wanted to watch this before it left the Criterion Channel streaming site, and it was a wonderful little gem of a film.

Thoughts on Obsession

   At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw Obsession, a 2025 supernatural psychological horror film written and directed by Curry Barker. The film stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a young man in his early twenties who works at a music store with his friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Sarah (Megan Lawless), and Nikki (Inde Navarette). Bear has a crush on Nikki, but is too nervous to confess his feelings to her, and Ian wants him to just get it over with and ask her, but not during their weekly bar trivia night, as to not spoil the fun. Bear comes home to find that his cat Sandy has died after accidentally consuming Bear's oxycodone pills. The next day, he shops for a gift for Nikki because she lost her crystal necklace, and he goes to a crystal shop, but instead of getting a crystal, he finds a novelty toy called "One Wish Willow," where the user can make one wish and break a plastic log in half. 

    Later that night, after bar trivia, Bear drives Nikki home, who is asking him if he likes Sarah, hinting that Sarah likes him. Bear completely whiffs the chance to confess his feelings, denying it when Nikki directly asks if he likes her, and as she is at the front door of his house, Bear in his car goes, "I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone else in the world," and snaps the willow log. Suddenly, Nikki stops before going into the house, then runs back to Bear in his car, and her behavior is erratic, switching between wanting him to come inside and then screaming, and then brushing off her own behavior as "weird." Bear is confused by Nikki's behavior, but comes in, and she keeps switching between trying to seduce him and having screaming fits. Bear doesn't understand any of this, and despite his own hesitations, he is flattered when Nikki is attracted to him, and against his better judgment, takes advantage of the situation, and they become a couple, with Nikki being overly possessive and jealous, manipulating him with her mood swings.

    This movie could be taken in different ways, how it is about an unhealthy, codependent relationship, where the monster that has taken over Nikki (it is implied that the real Nikki's consciousness is trapped in some kind of hell while the "loving girlfriend" persona takes over, with large, forced smiles that she holds for an uncomfortable amount of time) is the abuser, taking advantage of Bear's attraction to her by keeping him close to her and acting out in random violence of hurting herself or others. But that it can be seen as Bear having unwittingly taken away Nikki's free will, and rather than finding a way earlier to undo the spell or fix things, he lets it go on because he is happy that his crush is so into him and his fantasy has become a reality. Nikki may be the violent one causing mayhem, but Bear is the one who started this by being unable to face rejection or get out of his arrested development of acting like a teenager when he is past 21 years old.

    The movie is very effective with silhouettes and shadows, often hiding Nikki's face, or the brief times when the real Nikki will get control of her body to speak her own words or ask for help before the monster shuts her down again. 

    The two leads are fantastic in the film. Michael Johnston takes a character that can be sympathetic at first as a lovelorn loser who is pining after his crush, unaware that his other female friend is into him, and seems emotionally stunted and needs to grow up more. But then he becomes more selfish in taking advantage of the situation, and though his idle wish doesn't deserve such punishment, when the real Nikki reaches out to him for help, he still can only think of his own desires and not her feelings.

    Inde Navarette is in a star-making turn with this performance. Director Curry Barker had her study performances from Betty Gabriel in Get Out, Toni Collette in Hereditary, and Mia Goth in Pearl to develop the character of Nikki, and there are elements from those roles, like Betty Gabriel's performance as a woman whose body is possessed and whose soul is in the Sunken Place, only able to briefly reach out with her real life briefly, and Mia Goth's performance as a manic woman who tries to act "normal" but, in the finale, greets her horrified husband with an unsettling wide smile throughout the ending credits. Navarette switches between voices and personas quickly; saying "no" several times in one scene with different rising intonations; and her physical performance is raw and emotionally taxing. The film helps with showing Nikki before the transformation, as a regular person, making it more tragic when her body and mind is stolen by this demon because of Bear's unrequited crush.

    The movie is also darkly funny. It's meant to be grim, but there are several moments that are funny, like Nikki's intense frowny face; the reaction from a crystal shop employee saying that people come back to complain about the wishes they got and Bear not understanding the risk he's taking; the response from the One Wish Willow customer service representative that Bear calls to try to cancel the wish; and another attempt to fix the wish that goes horribly wrong. 

    I really liked this movie. I kept forgetting the characters were young adults because they acted like teenagers, and it did speak a lot to their own immaturity and limited life experiences when trying to handle adult situations. I'm glad this movie ended up becoming a sleeper hit, it's well-deserved.