Movie review by Greg Carlson

I admit to having a soft spot for movies that eventually transform into swans of the cult-following variety after languishing as box office and/or critical ugly ducklings. Despite affection for witchy tales and the presence of two appealing future Oscar-winners in major roles (not to mention the incredible Dianne Wiest, already an Academy Award-winner, in support), the original 1998 “Practical Magic” was not my cup of herbal tea. I am happy, though, that it found dedicated defenders. I also have a fascination with long-delayed sequels (“The Color of Money,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” for example) because it is such strange and delightful fun to catch up with old friends and imagine what they have been doing for all those years.

In the case of “Practical Magic 2,” based on the 2021 Alice Hoffman novel “The Book of Magic,” the dreaded curse suffered by generations of Owens family witches continues to vex the offspring of Sandra Bullock’s Sally, who has made sister Gillian (Nicole Kidman) promise not to tell Sally’s daughters Kylie and Antonia (now played by Joey King and Maisie Williams) anything about their magical heritage. Kylie has fallen in love with Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), setting up the plot that will hinge on a trip from New England to Old England. Sally and Gillian, realizing the grave danger awaiting Kylie, follow the young woman, soon crossing paths with occult historian Ian Wright (Lee Pace).

It would be fair as well as easy to take the production to task for essentially erasing the happy ending of Griffin Dunne’s original, a common sequel tactic that gathers like a storm cloud (I hated learning that Ali left Daniel for a football player at the outset of “The Karate Kid Part II,” to name one similar instance). Director Susanne Bier senses the limitations of the source enough to emphasize the stuff that most appeals to the fanbase. Leaning heavily into the themes of ride-or-die sisterhood, Bier makes lots of space for Bullock and Kidman to perfect a Laurel and Hardy routine that snips some of the slapstick but retains the light bickering and underlying affection of Stan and Oliver.

Seeing the two big stars share the screen will be enough for some devotees, but “Practical Magic 2” should have applied more hocus pocus before we get to the special effects-heavy showdown at the climax. Why is there a running gag in which the sisters struggle up multiple flights with heavy roller bags when a simple spell could have levitated the burden? Once the sisters meet Pace’s tattoo-covered mystery man, the comic hijinks temporarily shift to a bizarre triangle abetted by Gillian’s matchmaking encouragement. Bullock and Kidman retain their camaraderie and chemistry, even if Sally takes center stage while Gillian is shifted off to the side.

Sequels like “Practical Magic 2” are expected to be cinematic comfort food, a recipe dependent on the reuse of many of the ingredients that viewers love in the originals. Besides the presence of additional Stevie Nicks on the soundtrack, Bier might have erred too much on reprise, since the deathwatch beetle, the mixing of midnight margaritas to Nilsson’s “Coconut,” and the rooftop umbrella descent all reappear. Alongside that nostalgia is something akin to a passing of the torch (hail to Wiest and Stockard Channing!), as Sally and Gillian recognize their ascendancy to senior status in the Owens matriarchy. They are the aunts now.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Shortly before the theatrical run of “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World,” the gentle and moving feature documentary by Sasha Waters that honors the late poet in nearly all the best possible ways, a friend wrote to me: “I am probably not alone in saying that Mary Oliver saved my life.” In the movie, an admirer hoping that Oliver will recite “The Journey” expresses the same sentiment, confirming and affirming the power of the great writer. Oliver died in early 2019 at the age of 83 following one wild and precious life. Blending archival images, newly captured interviews with Oliver confidantes and fans, and her signature 16mm footage, Waters strikes a fine balance between a traditional biographical account and an artistically-minded embrace of words.

Along the way, Waters dismantles the tenacious misperceptions that dogged Oliver for so long. The master’s deceptive simplicity and straightforward language, along with the pejorative “nature poet” label that often made for easy critical dismissal, confounded many elitists. Add to that the late-bloomer narrative (the Pulitzer would be hers in 1984 and the National Book Award recognition followed in 1992) as well as Oliver’s steadfast refusal to be anthologized in women-only collections and a bigger picture comes into sharper focus. Lindsay Whalen, who will be publishing a highly anticipated authorized biography, is one of several valuable talking heads interviewed by Waters.

Along with Whalen, many poets, intellectuals, academics, and celebrities appear on camera to sing Oliver’s praises. The movie begins with Stephen Colbert attempting to recite “The Summer Day.” Colbert manages to get through the first line of what is arguably Oliver’s most frequently quoted poem before he is too overwhelmed with emotion to continue. It’s no stunt, as Waters will return to and then ultimately bookend her film with Colbert’s earnestness and gravitas. Waters faces the herculean task of choosing key poems to highlight. Colbert receives a welcome assist from Jason Reynolds on “The Summer Day.” Reynolds: “It’s great every single time.”

The filmmaker knows very well that the sight of some famous faces – Oprah Winfrey, Helena Bonham-Carter and Steve Buscemi, for example – casts a glow different from the sort made by the likes of Ariana Reines, David Keplinger, Major Jackson, Donika Kelly, Gabrielle Calvocoressi and others. Bridging the gap is filmmaker John Waters, a perennial documentary guest tapped for his seemingly endless supply of on-camera wit in the service of many topics. In this specific case, however, the inclusion of Waters turns out to be crucial. His close, decades-long friendship with Oliver and Oliver’s great love Molly Malone Cook, forged in their beloved Provincetown neighborhood, allows the film to explore Oliver’s queerness from an intimately personal perspective.

Oliver said that the two things she loved “from a very early age were the natural world and dead poets.” Without any pedantry, Sasha Waters folds in enough history to place Oliver in the American pantheon alongside titans like singular influence Walt Whitman (Oliver quipped that she read “Whitman, Whitman and Whitman”). The film touches on everything from Oliver’s work for Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister Norma Millay Ellis to the curious way she handled the tension between competing desires for privacy and recognition. Those Whitmanesque contradictions, and a rich body of work, reveal an unforgettable original whose literary reputation continues to grow larger and larger.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Third-year psychology student Emily (Angourie Rice), an American abroad at the fictional Manchester City University, alights on what she thinks will be the perfect case study to complete her psychology thesis project: musician/sound engineer Owen (Spike Fearn), chasing after another Emily he met briefly at the student union club where he works, is desperate to reconnect after one fleeting interaction. Emily’s specific topic focuses on attachment theory and the “madness” of romantic love, but viewers should be able to immediately guess that she – and not the mystery Emily – will end up with Owen. Since the heyday of Lubitsch, Cukor, Capra, Hawks and others, it’s the journey and not the inevitable destination that matters when it comes to our attractive protagonists.

Alicia MacDonald, making a workmanlike feature directorial debut, connects all the dots provided by Rachel Hirons’ screenplay. In an interview with Cole Groth, MacDonald openly acknowledges the checklist of formulaic conventions practically hardwired into the genre, citing the “meet-cute, the running sequence, the declaration of love at the end, and friends-to-lovers” trajectory along with the obligatory “dark night of the soul” montage. I could not agree, despite MacDonald’s claims to the contrary, that any of these tropes are handled with stark originality. And that’s just fine. The target audience will show up to see something of their own lives in the awkward courtship of Emily and Owen.

Even if you believe in love at first sight like the smitten Owen, the charms of “Finding Emily” are embedded in the broader philosophical breakdowns postulated by the likes of Plato and C. S. Lewis; Emily and Owen can only come to love one another after spending quality time together and forging a friendship (eventually) based on mutual respect. I say eventually because the story must provide some obligatory obstacles and stumbling blocks to affirm Shakespeare’s dramatic wisdom that the “course of true love never did run smooth.” In this case, Emily has rather ill-advisedly withheld from Owen the whole truth of his role in her research study. Talk about a whopper of a use-of-human-subjects I.R.B ethics violation!

We would not have a movie if Emily told the truth to Owen right from the start. But we’re also inclined to forgive our heroine because we know she is at heart a good person. The always engaging presence of the Australian Rice (who has long mastered a flawless American accent) makes a good match with Fearn’s slightly scruffy, footie-jersey-and-chain-wearing, fish-and-chips, working-class lad. The storied city may not factor with the same degree of importance as it enjoyed in “24 Hour Party People,” but the handsome and colorful location photography by Rachel Clark announces the metro as a vibrant and vital character.

“Finding Emily” won’t threaten “When Harry Met Sally” as the modern-era gold standard for the friends-to-lovers rom-com, but the adorable Rice and Fearn play the angles. Particularly enjoyable is the superb soundtrack, featuring nods to Manchester’s storied musical pedigree alongside some diegetic needle-drops that urge Emily and Owen to make their own and/or shake to all kinds of fun selections supervised by Iain Cooke, including New Order, the Durutti Column, Black Grape, Scissor Sisters, Tom Tom Club, W. H. Lung, and a James Blake cover of Joy Division.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

An increasingly intimate relationship between a filmmaker and a reclusive horror actor commands our attention in “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” director Jane Schoenbrun’s highly anticipated follow-up to the much lauded “I Saw the TV Glow.” Schoenbrun’s latest, described by the artist in an interview with JP Mangalindan for “Time” as emerging from the “fun parts” of transitioning as opposed to the more frightening aspects explored in “I Saw the TV Glow,” is essential viewing for genre fans and cinephiles. Operating with a budget nearly double the estimated 5.4 million dollars spent on “Glow,” “Miasma” deftly blends comedy, eroticism, gore, and VHS-era nostalgia into an intoxicating brew of deeply personal storytelling.

The title refers to a once-popular slasher franchise that has beguiled moviemaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) since she first witnessed – at the tender age of eight – the performance of the inaugural entry’s final girl Billy Presley (Amanda Fix). In particular, Kris has been drawn over and over again to a scene in which Presley’s character loses her virginity, an uncomfortable and mesmerizing interaction made even more complex by Billy’s revelation that she was sexually assaulted during the film’s production. In the present day, Kris pursues an older Billy (Gillian Anderson), hoping to convince her to participate in a planned reboot/relaunch/refresh of the dormant “Camp Miasma” series.

Like their last feature, Schoenbrun maximizes the cinematic potential of surreal and stylized environments in part by pointing much of our close attention to the shifting relationship dynamics of a central pair. Where Maddy (Jack Haven) and Owen (Justice Smith) were surrounded by the engrossing world-building of “The Pink Opaque,” Kris and Billy step into and out of the past, present, and possible future of the movie series haunted by the cleverly-named Little Death (Haven), a relentless killer in the vein of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. And even though the emotional heart of the movie can be found in the conversations shared by Kris and Billy, Schoenbrun knows exactly when to shift into wordless pure cinema and bodily fluid phantasmagoria.

One of the most impressive and appreciated dimensions of Schoenbrun’s close examination of sexual politics is the open, curious and thoughtful manner in which key themes and issues are investigated. The writer-director acutely fathoms the messy intersection of cinema’s scopophilic allure and the gnarly and frequently problematic objectification of the body as a core element in so many horror films. And while the tone and tenor of “Miasma” embraces the sex-positive breakthrough of self-acceptance, the onscreen kills (which deliver crimson fountains, torrents and showers of blood) match each of the orgasmic milestones experienced by Schoenbrun stand-in Kris.

“Teenage Sex and Death” received the independently sponsored Queer Palm following its premiere at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will surely remain one of the highest profile queer/trans features released this year. Schoenbrun’s cinephilia, which extends well beyond the lore, tropes and mythology of 1980s slasher flicks to conjure Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” body horror and Gloria Swanson’s iconic performance as Norma Desmond in Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” proves irresistible to film fanatics. Key writings that include Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Carol Clover’s “Men, Women, and Chain Saws,” and Linda Williams’ “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” find an ideal textual site and an apt pupil in “Miasma.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

David Robert Mitchell’s energizing dino-danger adventure “The End of Oak Street” descends upon us like a late-summer gift from the Hollywood heavens. If possible, go see it knowing nothing ahead of time and then come back to read the rest of this review. Mitchell’s fourth film as writer-director continues the moviemaker’s preoccupation with the subtleties and nuances of familiar suburban experiences charged through with a heightened sense of the uncanny. In “Oak Street,” an inexplicable cross-time event drops a family struggling with internal domestic peril into a prehistoric bubble of run-for-your-life peril. Both the early 1980s setting and the central presence of thundering theropods draw a straight line to principal inspiration Steven Spielberg.

But Mitchell’s critters, which include a massive, snake-like, Titanoboa-inspired scene-stealer, a fantastically-feathered Allosaurus, and a full complement of threats large and small, are integrated into a dynamic drama that stands apart from the Jurassic World-era of Universal’s franchise. By jettisoning Jurassic Park/World’s focus on the hubristic fallout of unethical science in thrall to investor greed, Mitchell invigorates the viewer by deliberately aligning our own confusion and disorientation with the stunned reactions of the Platts, a Michigan quartet made up of aspiring novelist Denise (Anne Hathaway), alcohol-dependent Greg (Ewan McGregor), and their kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery).

The central family unit, threatened initially by the grim possibility of dissolution by divorce, must work together once the gnarly claws and jaws start stampeding across lawns. McGregor is as dependable as ever, but Hathaway, whose 2026 is turning out to be her annus mirabilis, takes over “Oak Street” with a ferocious conviction. Mitchell’s movie marks the fourth of Hathaway’s five releases this calendar year – the highest tally of her career. The Oscar-winning star’s chops are as impressive as her instincts; devoted fans might recall her terrific turn as another writer tangled up with a giant monster in Nacho Vigalondo’s darkly comic kaiju homage “Colossal.”

Grouches might argue that Mitchell skimps on richer and deeper characterizations in favor of the constant escalation of theme park thrills. To my mind, however, the filmmaker’s all gas-no brakes method here is as deliberate and methodical as many of Hitchcock’s prime chases. “The Myth of the American Sleepover,” “It Follows” and “Under the Silver Lake” all explored, to one degree or another, the illusion of safety and comfort falsely provided by our neighborhoods (a theme that David Lynch carried to its apotheosis in “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks”). In this regard, “Oak Street” comfortably harmonizes with the director’s impressive filmography.

It’s difficult to say whether “The End of Oak Street” would have worked better without the limitations of the PG-13 rating, but Mitchell, like Spielberg before him, appears to take genuine pleasure in walking right up to the line without crossing it. What we don’t see, enhanced by sound designer Paula Fairfield and her team, is as unsettling as what we do witness. A few critics have detected a mean-spiritedness in the delivery of the carnage and mayhem while others (myself included) would like to imagine that the director is sending a clear message to the next generation of moviemakers: being scared is OK. The film’s dedication, made by Mitchell to his late father, speaks volumes.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Discussing the parameters, ramifications, and impossibilities of the absolutely outlandish premise of Will Gluck’s latest movie is nearly equal to the fun of gawping at the heavenly bodies of stars Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro as they work their way toward an inevitable rom-com resolution in “One Night Only.” Several wags have taken to calling the high-concept film “The Sex Purge,” as we land in a version of America in which the government has implemented a prohibition on unmarried intercourse for all but twelve free-for-all hours on a single night of the year. Despite the tantalizing politics hanging ripe on the vine, Gluck sticks close to the usual genre trappings.

The director, working from a screenplay by Travis Braun, fills in just enough information to allow pleasure-seeking viewers a sliver of suspended-disbelief verisimilitude during the world building that sets the stage. Information placed in the background and at the fringes of the frame makes for a clumsier version of the anamorphosis described by Slavoj Žižek in his perceptive notes on “Children of Men.” Signage and graffiti protesting the no-sex mandate pop up while cable news hosts and talking heads argue the values of the legislation. Corporate advertisements for condoms, lubricants, and less obvious products point toward some kind of capitalist buy-in, although the revelation that citizens have digital devices implanted in their wrists to biometrically monitor carnal activity sends a chill down the spine.

The desire to avoid committing a sex crime keeps most everyone in line, even if Orwell’s Big Brotherly predictions might otherwise put a damper on our enjoyment of the hijinx by cutting too close to our real world’s march toward authoritarianism and a 24/7 surveillance state. “One Night Only” essays and reviews opting to address these less savory aspects of Braun’s dystopia continue to sprout. One of the best of the bunch is a “Vulture” piece by Roxana Hadadi in which the author calls the film the “bleakest political allegory [of the] year, one in which Americans are sheep who willingly accept the rules of a conservative government; corporations support unpopular policies because it helps them make more money; and preening politicians go on TV to discuss their agendas with little pushback from journalists.”

All of this can be true and simultaneously coexist with the scopophilic charge provided by the movies. Gluck understands that much. We desperately want to see Barbaro’s aspiring composer/performer Allie and Turner’s pizza shop proprietor Owen get together in lust and in love. And, having consumed hundreds of erotically-charged silver screen romances built on the foundations of Lubitsch’s perfect touch, we expect that our star-crossed beauties will repeatedly postpone the consummation of their desire to heighten and intensify our excitement.

Given the ticking-clock urgency of the narrative, Gluck sketches a familiar range of slapstick complications standing in the way of true love’s course. Even with our eyes glued to Turner and Barbaro, the episodic structure allows for comic cameos by Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton and a bunch of other recognizable faces. Allie and Owen feign some degree of moral resolve by denying the obvious; Owen’s long-term girlfriend blindsides him by deciding to sleep with someone else and he can’t quite decide what to do about it. Working together and splitting apart, and then repeating the cycle, the protagonists experience a compressed courtship that calls up everything from the effortless brilliance of “After Hours” (1985) to the mostly forgotten “Timer” (2009).

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Gregg Araki, New Queer Cinema legend and provocateur, now 66, brings some laughter and some pain to the kids who weren’t yet born when the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy shook up indie/outsider/DIY moviemaking back in the 1990s (where does the time go?). “I Want Your Sex,” which ends a dozen-year drought following 2014’s underseen “White Bird in a Blizzard,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The energetic feature, which Araki co-wrote with Slutever founder Karley Sciortino, draws heavily from the filmmaker’s love for classic screwball comedy and talent for button-pushing. The result is a thoroughly entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking satire ready to grapple with art, politics, romance, and generational division.

In tandem with “The Invite,” which she also directed, Olivia Wilde notches a second memorable 2026 performance as Erika Tracey, a ruthless visual artist whose hire of young Elliot Bell (Cooper Hoffman) rapidly leads to a wholly unethical BDSM relationship complicated and compounded by Elliot’s feelings for longtime bestie/roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) and post-doc bookworm girlfriend Minerva (Charlie XCX). Hoffman, drilling down on the Benjamin Braddock/Harold Chasen territory staked out in “Licorice Pizza,” makes the most of another golden opportunity to express lustful longing and drifting confusion in a young man/older woman dynamic.

And Wilde is top-of-game as the prowling, predatory Erika. Applying nuances, layers and shades not visible in the deliberately cartoonish version of the woman that exists on the page, Wilde manages a miracle in carving sympathy for the outwardly calculating and devilishly diabolical artist. Erika, whose high-ticket erotic pieces fund and fuel a Warhol-like factory managed by consigliere/business partner Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), saves her most intense acts of creation for the performative roleplay that defines her doomed dalliance with Elliot. Initially, Araki frames the exhilarating humiliation through the eyes of the young initiate as a kind of kinky bildungsroman, but by the time climax is reached, Erika has emerged to mirror her silver screen precursor, the venerable Norma Desmond.

Some of the juice can be attributed to Araki’s cinephilia; “I Want Your Sex” is, among other things, a glorious and candy-colored homage to Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (with winks to “9 ½ Weeks” and some Hitchcockian glitter bombs tossed in for good measure). Erika is not merely a cruel sadist toying with a helpless mouse. In Elliot, she finds a willing and eager pupil (Araki swapped the originally planned dom/sub genders in the wake of #MeToo). Like Norma, Erika completes her own meaningful arc and in so doing, personifies what David Lubin describes as Gloria Swanson’s “explosive mixture of power and pathos.”

Several critics have picked up on Araki’s invitation to twenty-something viewers who might otherwise be missing out on IRL human contact and intimacy in our screen-mediated climate. In an interview with Owen Myers for “The Guardian,” Araki suggests that “I Want Your Sex” exists in direct opposition to “this culture of oppression and fascism with the dictatorship of our current administration.” The movie refrains from the most obvious and direct politicization, but Araki’s sex positive sentiments are unmistakable.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The movies love to dramatize, to one degree or another, the struggles of mental illness. Major studios are frequently seduced by the prestige potential of both fiction and nonfiction bestsellers on the topic that dangle the possibilities of award season accolades and even Oscar gold. More often than not, those adaptations (and the scores of similarly-themed original screenplays that make it to completion) emphasize conflict that fails to capture a comprehensive sense of the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly grind and quotidian experiences of individuals and families facing unique challenges, mandated interventions and a wide range of painful decisions resulting from a diagnosed or undiagnosed disorder.

In her feature-length debut “Blue Heron,” now available to view in America on the Criterion Channel following its world premiere last year at the Locarno Film Festival (where it received the Swatch First Feature Award), the talented filmmaker Sophy Romvari creates an extraordinary and extraordinarily cinematic evocation of memory and grief. In 2020, the director attracted significant attention for the short documentary “Still Processing,” which addresses a few of the same autobiographical elements used in “Blue Heron.” Romvari, the youngest of four siblings, was born in Victoria, British Columbia not long after her brothers and parents emigrated from Hungary.

Through the eyes of young Sasha (Eylul Guven), “Blue Heron” features a family that corresponds with Romvari’s real one. Set on Vancouver Island, where the filmmaker grew up, the first half of the movie carefully stacks an escalating series of tiny incidents that reveal the many ways in which Sasha and the viewers come to recognize the deep troubles of oldest brother Jeremy (a superb Edik Beddoes). Choosing snippets of overheard conversations rather than dialogue-dependent exposition, Romvari aligns the audience with Sasha in a kid’s-eye-view perspective of a family unraveling.

Following increasingly disturbing behavior that eventually results in a home visit from a social worker, we learn that Jeremy may be exhibiting signs of oppositional defiant disorder. Beddoes brings to his character a quiet menace while earning heartbreaking sympathy. Jeremy’s actions always speak louder than any of his infrequent words; Romvari locates the liminal passageway between Sasha’s love for her brother and the frustration wreaked by his disruptive and antisocial conduct. Some viewers will certainly be reminded of Lynne Ramsay’s astonishing gifts in work like “Die My Love” and especially “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” the latter of which thematically rhymes with “Blue Heron.”

While “We Need to Talk About Kevin” grapples with the toll of unthinkable violence, Romvari’s narrative approach to personal reckoning and reconciliation arrives in the movie’s depiction of Sasha as an adult (played by Amy Zimmer). We connect the dots to Sasha’s formative interactions as a mediamaker, fostered in part by the frequent presence of her father’s camcorder. In a tour de force series of scenes in which we are invited to witness Romvari the artist unpack the trauma of Romvari the daughter/sister, the director hotwires past and present. Operating partially as a kind of metatextual contemplation on the subjective elasticity of both remembrance and imagination, “Blue Heron” soars toward poetry.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Working from a script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, Olivia Wilde puts her own stamp on Cesc Gay’s play “Los vecinos de arriba,” which Gay made as a 2020 film known in English as both “Sentimental” and “The People Upstairs.” The story, revolving around two neighbor couples who experience a surprising evening together, unfolds largely over the course of a few hours and explores themes including love, lust, commitment and disconnection. The tantalizing farcical possibilities of an unexpected orgy and the relatively low cost of four performers in what is essentially a single location have turned Gay’s piece into a cottage industry.

Prior to Wilde’s take, audiences around the world have laughed, winced, and shed a few tears at cinematic iterations in Italy (“Vicini di casa”), France (“Tu plus si affinités”), Russia (“Neprilichnye gustosti”), the Czech Republic (“Ve dne v noci”), South Korea (“Witjip saramdeul”) and Switzerland (“Die Nachbarn von oben”). Jones and McCormack, longtime friends and writing partners who were romantically involved with one another many years ago, crack Gay’s writing by fine-tuning character specifics and peculiarities to the talents and charms of Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. The resulting feature has been called a return to form by those who thought Wilde stumbled with “Don’t Worry Darling” after the success of directorial debut “Booksmart.”

In addition to duties behind the camera, Wilde takes on the role of Angela, a nervous and insecure San Franciscan raising an almost teenage daughter with husband Joe (Rogen). Estranged from intimacy and barely navigating rocky marital waters, Angela and Joe prepare to welcome the smooth and attractive Hawk (Norton) and Piña (Cruz) – who have been disturbing the peace with some loud and boisterous sex – down to their apartment for food and drink. Joe intends to confront the thunderous sweethearts but things take a sharp turn when Hawk and Piña preemptively apologize for the volume of their lovemaking. The confession quickly becomes an admission; it turns out Hawk and Piña have some very progressive ideas when it comes to sexual experimentation.

Wilde avoids the pitfalls of set-bound claustrophobia by applying savvy compositions abetted by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra and a silky editorial flow courtesy of Yorgos Mavropsaridis and Anthony Boys. Once the tension shifts from Joe and Angela’s bitter bickering to the potential for a guilt-free sex party, Wilde finds the perfect modulation between gears. Rogen’s affinity for physical comedy is matched by Norton’s unctuous smarm, while Wilde contrasts Angela’s anxious edges against the effortless manner in which Cruz communicates the tranquil confidence of Piña. Wilde makes space for all four performers to shine individually and together.

In movies that foreground deviation from sexual norms, difference and kink are more often than not played for broad laughs. Surprisingly, “The Invite” refuses to suggest that Hawk and Piña should be seen as aberrant freaks unworthy of our respect when it comes to matters of the flesh. The movie has been frequently compared to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” but Wilde’s treatment of Gay’s comic preoccupation with the possibilities of carefree pleasure and uninhibited sex takes up too much real estate to match the boozy recriminations and submerged pain that fuels the brilliant Mike Nichols adaptation of Albee. After a slapstick crescendo, Wilde confronts with wisdom and sincerity the misery that threatens to tear Joe and Angela asunder.