The Invite (c) A24
Film: The Invite
In Cinemas
Director/Actor Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her misguided Don’t Worry, Darling is the much more successful The Invite, the buzzy Sundance hit about two couples who barely know each other but have preconceptions. Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) are a long-married couple with a young daughter, living in Joe’s parents’ San Francisco apartment that he grew up in and never left. Joe is surprised one night when Angela announces she has invited their new upstairs neighbors for dinner, a couple whose loud sex in the middle of the night has bothered Joe since they moved in. Angela just wants to make new friends and finds them fascinating. They are Pína (Penélope Cruz), a therapist, and her boyfriend Hawk (Edward Norton), a retired firefighter, and their love affair feels fresh and exciting. Between Joe’s need to confront them about their noise and Angela’s need to please, Will McCormack and Rashida Jones’ script is funny, clever and occasionally cringy, especially when the neighbors explain the secret to their relationship, and their own invite to Joe and Angela. I was surprised how much this film worked, when other claustrophobic small-cast films, like Carnage, have failed. Rogan gets a lot of the funny lines as he is the audience’s stand-in as the film starts to head into more awkward situations. Wilde and Norton both have fine moments, including Hawk’s monologue as to how he got his name, but the most impressive performance is from Cruz, whose Pína always seems to be in control of the evening’s agenda. The ending feels a little rushed, otherwise The Invite is the kind of smart, American adult comedy we don’t get in multiplexes anymore.
Leviticus (c) NEON
Film: Leviticus
In Cinemas
With the resurgence of horror movies recently, it’s refreshing when one presents a different point of view but is no less scary or provocative. Australian director/writer Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus is set in the 1990s and follows two high school students, newly arrived loner Naim (Joe Bird) and charismatic Ryan (Stacy Clausen), who, after a friendly tussle, realize they are attracted to each other. The conservative town’s church brings in a witch doctor (or whatever the opposite of an exorcist is) who essentially curses the boys that any time they have impure thoughts of each other, they are attacked by God’s wraith, in the form of the object of their sinful lust. This is a very heady concept, but not dissimilar from the last gay horror film I saw, They/Them, about a teen conversion therapy camp where sex can literally kill you. Both films’ metaphor, that religion is the major source of justification for the real-life horror hurled against LGBTQ people, is a good starting point for the terrifying events that happen. But Leviticus, like the earlier film, has a hard time sticking the landing of a satisfying ending. Until then, Chiarella ramps up the horrors of the story, especially when we see each boy’s literal fight with an invisible demon, and the helplessness they feel, when neither the cops nor Naim’s mother (a welcomed Mia Wasikowska) believe their story. Bird and Clausen are welcome discoveries and they have an undeniable chemistry. I just don’t buy how the film ends, as if the solution could be that easy. Still, there are enough jump scares and fun set-ups (including one in an abandoned warehouse) that keeps things interesting.
Girls Like Girls (c) Focus Features
Film: Girls Like Girls
In Cinemas
Indie queer cinema doesn’t get more mainstream than writer/director Hayley Kiyoko’s feature debut, which proudly announces, so there is no miscommunication, that sometimes in life, Girls Like Girls. Based on Kiyoko’s 2015 song of the same name, the film follows Coley (Maya da Costa), a soon-to-be high school senior, who moves to a new town in Oregon to live with her father (Zach Braff), a man she hardly knows, after the death of her mother. At the start of summer, the shy Coley, meets a group of kids her age, and she tentatively starts hanging out with them. The friendliest of the group is popular Sonya (Myra Molloy), who has dreams of being a dancer, and despite seemingly dating the goofy but not clueless Trenton (Levon Hawke, Maya’s brother), starts flirting with Coley. The growing attraction between the two leads feels natural and honest, and despite the fact that what happens in the film follows a predictable pattern, it provides enough giddy romance before the inevitable “oh, I was so drunk last night” excuses begin the relationship’s downfall. In place of contemporary teen film’s reliance on texting and social media as plot points, Girls Like Girls uses AIM as its communication device, which just feels embarrassingly antiquated through modern lens. Kiyoko cast the girls with diverse backgrounds with Coley’s mother being either Hispanic or Native American (it’s not made clear) and Sonya is Asian, even though these facts are never brought up ever. da Costa reminds me of a young Lily Gladstone, as she derives as much power from her stillness as she does in her actions, while Molloy has the feel of a young Zendaya, having her Sonya try to act cool but losing her real self in the process. Special mention must go to Braff, who gives an impressive supporting performance as the dad trying to step up but fails at every turn. It’s engaging enough to enjoy for Pride month, although you might, like the young lady at my screening, yell out occasionally, “Oh, come on!”
Voicemails for Isabelle (c) Netflex
Film: Voicemails for Isabelle
Streaming on Netflix
Romantic comedies on Netflix all seem to share the same DNA in our two would-be lovers have an interesting twist that stands in the way of their happiness, with the script always taking the easiest way out. Despite being an aggressively generic and predictable story at the start, Leah McKendrick’s Voicemails for Isabelle breaks out of the mold just enough during its second half to make us care about our heroes. Although the film does not make it into the best Netflix films of this genre, like The Map of Tiny Perfect Things and Love at First Sight, this latest installment does share with those films overqualified actors in the leads, who give their characters more depth than the script provides. Jill (Zoey Deutch) is an aspiring chef, who moved to San Francisco to work at a TV Top Chef’s bakery, despite the fact that her sister, Izzy (Ciara Bravo), back in Austin, Texas, is dying of cancer. When Izzy dies, Jill in her grief, continues to leave voicemails on Izzy’s phone, narrating her days, like she used to when she was alive. Enter plot twist (as Taylor Swift would ask, “Are you ready for it?”), her number has now been given to the new phone of Austin real estate agent Wes (Love, Simon’s Nick Robinson), a young, sexy rich guy who somehow just hasn’t found the right girl yet. He is the recipient of Jill’s voicemails, and starts to get invested in her day-to-day spunkiness, up to the point that he starts (this is a romcom, so it’s not at all creepy) to follow her social media and even uses that info to accidentally meet her. The film obviously wants to be a contemporary version of You Got Mail (so much so, that they keep bringing that film up), and the two actors give their characters enough charm to almost make it work. Deutch always makes Jill the smartest person in the room who never acts on her instinct, and Robinson sells playing the douche who regrets everything he does the minute he does it. His best moment is when his friends want Wes to snap out of it, Robinson convincingly sells the Taylor Swift lyric: “The old Wes can’t come to phone right now. Why? Cause he’s dead.” (Did I mention that Swift gave permission for this film to use a couple of her songs?) Moments like those make Voicemails for Isabelle endearing and effective in the second half.
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