Screening Room

September 4, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s ability to give celebrated actors amusingly potty-mouthed and insulting things to spew in specific places has previously paid awards dividends. After sweeping up the gongs with Three Billboards and The Banshees of Inisherin his latest exploration of friendship via comedic violence and swears is sure to secure a place in the awards season stable – especially for John Malkovich, channelling Dangerous Liaisons waspish disdain and the befuddlement of his alt-persona in Being John Malkovich to delicious effect.

John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey — Diego Araya Corvalán

He plays a grizzled CIA agent, Chris, who is stationed in Chile in 1973 and a pain in the ass of bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi). His longtime partner, Lee (Sam Rockwell) is used to his no-filter outbursts – with the duo constantly bickering like an old marriage couple – but as a coup looms the two are sent to Rapa Nui on a break. Chris has always wanted to see ‘the big heads’ and Lee is happy to get his loose-lipped friend away from the exasperated MJ. Looking like two CIA agents trying to blend in (Hawaiian shirts, quirky hats), the duo set off, with Lee cautioning his friend to keep a low profile. That proves difficult for Chris as he tells a pair of students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) on the same flight that they are spooks and when they arrive at their hotel, shouts insults at a pair of British holidaymakers. Though they are ostensibly on vacation, it becomes apparent that both have secret, personal missions to complete…

Perhaps McDonagh’s fondest look at male relationships, Wild Horse Nine is not only the sort of buddy comedy with a screwball edge that provokes guffaws, it’s loaded with pathos and a reverence for the kind of brutal kindness only a true friend can serve. While it’s an absolute hoot to watch Malkovich go gonzo on anyone and everything – and Rockwell to masticate and placate his way through it – there’s also a genuine thriller at work here (who works for who?) as well as a treatise on euthenasia and what makes a person who they are. Kudos too to Parker Posey, stealing focus over the phone as Marge, Lee’s kaftan-wearing wife, who understands more than he knows; and Tom Waits as a gruff cameo with heart.

It’s probably McDonagh’s most accomplished work and it features a cast at the top of their game. Load onto that the stunning vistas of Rapa Nui – with this production being only the second film to ever film on the island – and Wild Horse Nine (yes, wild stallions do gallop beautifully across the landscape) is a retro, moving and funny piece of perfection. It recalls Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in both the tangible sense of a friendship and the sorrow for a moment passing, while also being a specifically McDonagh film. It’s entirely worthy of the awards buzz on the Venice Lido…

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES
Wild Horse Nine premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival

BUCKING FASTARD

September 3, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Werner Herzog begins his whimsical, empathic and quirky tale of two sisters living in enmeshment by dedicating it to the memory of David Lynch. Lynch would no doubt dig a film that is proudly unconventional and opaque to a degree that will likely be marmite to viewers. It opens with an Irish court hearing to bring a restraining order against Jean and Joan Holbrooke (Rooney and Kate Mara) for harassing a man they love (Orlando Bloom), before following the duo through their synchonised sibling existence as they seek romance and a sense of belonging by digging a tunnel through a mountain, adopting a fox and interacting with a wide range of men who want to protect/exploit them. The title of the piece is the accidental Spoonerism the sisters blurt out during their court proceedings, the real-life response of British twin sisters, Freda and Greta Chaplin, who Herzog met during the 1980s.

Domhnall Gleeson, Kate Mara, Orlando Bloom, Rooney Mara — HanWay Films

Though the Chaplins are the inspiration for the film (and the Maras are dressed in their idiosyncratic head scarfs and coats) Herzog uses the idea of them as a jumping-off point to explore identity, co-dependency, infatuation and the noble art of a quest. Jeanie and Joanie are so entwined that they speak and dress in unison, perform acts as a single person and view the world entirely through a lens only they share. That lack of outside context means they love fiercely and inappropriately when they fall for their neighbour who relishes a ‘cowgirl’ threesome but gets married to another woman. The impotence the women feel from his ghosting leads to criminal behaviour and the beginning of a court-ordered banishment which takes them to a city apartment where men spy on them, want selfies with them and, in the case of Domhnall Gleeson’s sweet social worker Timothy, try to integrate them into modern life. In a couple of the film’s more amusing moments Timothy stops them scrapping as they duo hoover and get wedged between chairs, and tries to get them to act independently while opening a sardine can. But ultimately, the sisters do not wish to change (‘we are we’ they say plaintively) and their hope for love that matches their own unique viewpoint takes them to the countryside of Sligo and a cave where they single-mindedly chip away at the rock and their life purpose to find some sort of epiphany.

Unspooling in a timeless, reality-adjacent bubble where the Holbrookes are inexplicably American in an Irish world, the Internet exists but people who come in contact with them are unphased by their otherness and foxes are gassed as rabies carriers, Bucking Fastards is a series of vignettes that meaning may be read into. The sisters are fastidious about the type of buttons they put on their coats and interact with a patient haberdasher, a sheep farmer takes them to some local caves and gets them obsessed with the isle of Orkney, they bury all their clothes in the garden because…well, because. That might intrigue or frustrate depending on a tolerance for the willfully oblique.

But what is mesmerising by any measure is the performance of the Maras as a fused child-like persona, their thoughts tumbling from their mouths in harmony like a wide-eyed Greek chorus and the secret looks between them given extra resonance by their off-screen relationship. Herzog’s fable is meandering and provides no easy answers, but it does give great fox (a non-CG critter called Cupid) and enough quirks to be engaging without ostensibly having very much to say.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of HANWAY FILMS
Bucking Fastard premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival

Screening Room

INK

September 2, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

James Graham’s award-winning West End and Broadway hit charting the birth of Britain’s The Sun newspaper and tabloid culture served the drama without op-ed – leaving the audience to decide on the morals and ethics at play, and the Pandora’s box such practice opened. Danny Boyle (with Graham adapting his work for screen) makes no apology for drawing a direct line between the ‘move-fast-break-things’ MO of newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch and his editor, Larry Lamb, and the latter-day rule-breaking narrators shaping our world. The epoch of The Sun, he posits, is the hellmouth for our problematic 21st century media landscape – that Murdoch and Lamb have blood, as well as ink, on their hands. And that we, as consumers, are as voracious as any hack hounding a story. But there’s also admiration for the underdog ambition and anti-establishment disruption of the endeavour, told with antsy Trainspotting verve and a nostalgic respect for the craft of physical media.

Guy Pearce, Jack O’Connell, Claire Foy, Danny Boyle — Anthony Dickenson/StudioCanal

Bookended by two meetings at Rules restaurant in London, Ink begins in 1969 with Aussie businessman Murdoch (Guy Pearce) making Northern journalist Lamb (Jack O’Connell) an offer he can’t refuse over a lobster dinner; editorship of an ailing broadsheet, with no guard rails and the opportunity to stick one in the eye of Fleet Street’s old boy’s network. Wily Lamb immediately tells Murdoch the principles of a good story – the 5 W’s: who, what, where, when and why. The ‘why’ he says, is the least important but it’s an element that drives the tale here with both men’s motivation explored. Ambitious Lamb is hellbent on besting his former employers at The Mirror as well as rattling a London-centric, middle-class and public school establishment that hazed him as a newbie. Murdoch’s desire to screw colonialism comes into focus as he amasses media companies with gimlet-eyed precision while being named ‘the dirty digger’ by Private Eye.

While the ‘why’ percolates, the who, what, where and when is provided as Lamb corrals a scrappy editorial team together like Danny Ocean recruiting his heist gang, enticing specialist journos onboard from Fleet Street bars, bathhouses and in the case of new women’s editor, Jules (a composite character and played by Claire Foy), his extra-marital bed. Moving as fast as the printing presses that are constantly heard as a low thrum throughout the action, Lamb’s initial building of a tabloid is a thrilling and amusing spectacle. In a smoke-filled newsroom of clattering typewriters and stories being slapped on spikes, Lamb demands his team make their work ‘louder’, conducting a brainstorming session to identify the real interests of the working man. TV, sport, personalities, weather and sex are top of the agenda, with the words ‘win’, ‘free’ or ‘love’ on the cover nabbing his staff a bonus. As the circulation figures creep up, the giveaways get sillier (knickers in a tin) and the presses roar, with Boyle leaning into framing and lighting that evokes Citizen Kane and a fondness for a lost world soundtracked by IDLES’ The New Sensation. Lamb swaggers through his domain demanding more WOBs (white on black text), italics, dog’s dicks (exclamation points), bangers (design roundels) as the typesetters sweat over the galley and chase… the sort of Fleet Street nerdism that demands a linotype advisor on the film’s credits.

It’s exhilarating stuff loaded with archival footage and AI-animated Getty images which showcase Murdoch and Lamb’s particular brand of fearless entrepreneurship, and leads them to the Press Council Awards where the elitism and bullying of the industry is laid bare. ‘The Aussie sheep farmer – a seat at the table’ Murdoch glowers of his personal oneupmanship. There is, of course, a price… rats are scuttling around the newsroom, there’s hypocrisy in exposing the failings of public figures and, when a Sun exec’s wife is kidnapped, real consequences in the way Lamb chooses to package the news. Shuttling through the arrival of page three girls, Thatcher, Murdoch’s empire expansion and Lamb’s successor, Kelvin MacKenzie, Boyle speeds up the flickering images to bring us to the sobering present via Princess Diana, Caroline Flack, Zuckerberg, Musk and Trump.

Considering the TS Eliot quote that closes this story, it would be easy to simply despise the players but in the hands of Pearce and O’Connell, Murdoch and Lamb remain complex human figures. Pearce’s clenched Murdoch, not yet a media baron, is a fascinating work in progress, while O’Connell gives Lamb a drive and charm that carries some of his more morally dubious choices into pathos. And Boyle’s ability to eddy audiences along with propulsive music, editing and strong period detail is like being sat on one of the tube trains that constantly hurtle through the piece. Entertainment is what Murdoch wanted from his newspaper and it’s what Boyle delivers here.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of STUDIOCANAL/NETFLIX
Ink premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival and will be in cinemas 11 December

Screening Room

ONE NIGHT ONLY

August 26, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

In an alt-theonomic USA premarital sex has been outlawed and singletons are only allowed to copulate (with a mandated condom) for one night a year – their identifying bio tattoo turning green to allow for 12 hours of horndogging. So, The Purge for sex. Those that have sex without authority are imprisoned and well, give this too much thought and it’s a deeply unsettling premise on which to set a rom-com – one which presents more questions than answers. But director Will Gluck (working from a script by Travis Braun) presses on with all the staples of the romantic genre (meet-cute, dash across town, reference to An Affair to Remember etc), two winning leads, numerous cameos and a Haim soundtrack to create a raunchy-com that just about works as long as audiences don’t look under the hood too much.

Callum Turner, Monica Barbaro, Maya Hawke, Molly Ringwald, Julia Fox — Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures

We arrive in New York as time ticks down to 12 hours of banging just as Owen (Callum Turner) is about to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) finishes work singing Psoriasis jingles. Owen’s first cockblock of the night happens when his girlfriend decides to have sex with their neighbour (Glen Powell) sending him into the street to look for a hook-up. He crosses paths with Allie as she prowls for a partner having been left solo by her wingwoman. Might these two good-looking people be the perfect bedfellows? Not when he barfs his proposal dinner on her shoes and she’s looking for real connection…

As they drift through the city, possible partners (portrayed by a string of cameos) and reasons not to get lucky (lack of condoms, criminal tendencies, Molly Ringwald’s embarrassing Mom), Allie and Owen find themselves repeatedly meeting and learning more about each other. He knows how she takes her coffee, she knows about his pizza parlour, he understands the red lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge that she loves, she gets his need for delayed gratification… all of which become signposted narrative callbacks by the end of the sex countdown, easily anticipated by any viewer with a passing knowledge of rom-coms. But better to lean into that than unpick the gender politics of why everyone constantly tells Owen he is hot (even a NYPD officer), why this is a world where no one protests the mandate or finds a workaround (couldn’t people just screw abroad?) or why there’s a pervading sense of promoting current moral pugnaciousness, heteronormativity and state-controlled reproduction. It’s almost like the film is asking us to consider what it might be like if The Handmaid’s Tale was about Offred just chilling out a bit, putting up with it and having some fun within her sexual suppression.

Turner and Barbaro are charming and effortless, selling the wacky scenarios their characters get into with the charisma of throwback stars of the genre. While their chemistry together may not entirely sizzle, they have more than enough a twinkle in their eyes to carry the picture and make audiences care if they each get their ahem, happy ending. And New York looks dazzling with its postcard views and food stops. You may want pizza by the end credits if not sex…

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of UNIVERSAL PICTURES
One Night Only is in cinemas now

Screening Room

THE END OF OAK STREET

August 13, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

David Robert Mitchell’s Spielburbian survival dino movie is a blueprint movie for anyone studying ‘Save The Cat’ screenplay methodology, though kitties do not fare well when a cosmic event transposes an eighties conurbation to the Jurassic era and T-Rexes tear through the neighbourhood. Nostalgia-led, with nods to ET, Back To The Future, Jaws, Poltergeist, The End Of Oak Street ticks every narrative device box in driving 90 minutes of entertainment that is fun but ephemeral. Kids making dumb decisions about dogs, predators that can outrun minor characters but not leads, signposted plot points, literal bookends… if it wasn’t so well funded, executed and acted (by Hathaway), the manipulation and derivation might chafe more. Plus, it features dino sex and Diplodocuses eating ice cream – so you know, a summer popcorn movie you won’t be mad about seeing.

Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery — Daniel McFadden/Warner Bros. Pictures

Opening with a 1982 summer street party (clearly a reshoot going by McGregor’s obtrusive wig), we meet the Platt family; Greg (McGregor) and his unhappy wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) with their kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). The parents are going through marriage and money woes, Audrey is an astronomy nerd who dreams of uni, Brian a boy who loves his mutt, Starbuck, and is trying to escape a pummelling from a local boy. As BBQs sizzle the Platts each yearn for change – no more so than Denise who is secretly writing a novel, loathes the domestic drudge and is contemplating divorce. One could view what comes next as a feminist wish fulfillment as a mother becomes a warrior hero and shows her abilities outside of the home – as she tells her husband ‘I can take as much as you, maybe more.’

There’s a lot to take after a night of torrential rain, mysterious lights and rumbles; in the morning there’s no utilities, a rainforest in the back yard and prehistoric critters going through the bins. As the Ambin-esque score swells the Platts separate, come together, endure grief, try to figure out how to get back to the future and do a lot of running. The neighbourhood plotted by the opening party is the parameters of the action, the introduced characters either chomped or following a simplistic escape plan – with deaths grisly in ideation without being graphic thanks to nifty camera angles and reaction shots. But this is essentially a thrill ride: tackle the T-Rex, the giant slithery Titanoboa, the pincer-movement Velociraptors, the flapping Ptereodactyls… The dinosaurs could be read as a manifestation of a frustrated woman raging against a patriarchal society but Oak Street is not that deep.

Loaded with eighties production design detail, deep background focus shots familiar from that era, the use of shadows and a musical cue that would feel familiar to Marty McFly, The End Of Oak Street taps into the retro fascination of Super 8 and Stranger Things and promises a fun time at the movies and like the kitties in the film, probably won’t last long in the memory. But sometimes, when it feels as hot as a prehistoric swamp, a disposable escape like this is exactly what we need.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of WARNER BROS. PICTURES
The End of Oak Street is in cinemas now

Screening Room

THE ODYSSEY

July 17, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Christopher Nolan’s Homer adaptation is a classic – both in genre and its ability to remain relevant in any age. While it may be a swords-n-sandals epic of myth, set in ‘a time of apparent magic’, the journey of a warrior returning home from war (physically, emotionally, mentally) explores themes of imperialism, PTSD, patriarchy, masculinity, the senselessness of war and the continued importance of writing in an increasingly post-literate, AI world. It is epic in scale, scope, ambition – a true event movie befitting the timeless power of an eighth century text.

Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, John Leguizamo, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Benny Safdie, Jon Bernthal — Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Nolan, of course, can weave narratives and multiple timelines, so he nimbly parses Homer’s time-skipping, media res poem into a three-hour adventure that begins in the royal palace of Ithaca where the queen, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), have waited twenty years for the return of their king, Odysseus (Matt Damon) from his battle in Troy. Penelope has spent years fighting off suitors, chief among them Antinous (Robert Pattinson), while Telemachus fiercely believes his father is still alive. For ten of those years Odysseus has been camped on the beaches of Troy trying to figure out how to gain access to the city on a rageful campaign spurred on by Agamemnon (Benny Safdie in a priapic suit of armour) and Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) pursuing his stolen wife, Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) – she whose face launched a thousand ships. His solution of the Trojan Horse allows his troops to sneak into the citadel and Nolan to sneak in questions about how much mankind has advanced from such brutal times with images that evoke 9/11 and a cast that speak in American accents as they pillage, brutalise and destroy. We might as well be watching rolling news were it not for the swords and breastplates. Having seen the horror he has unleashed with his trick, Odysseus’s perilous journey home taking in monsters, gods, witches and trips to Hades becomes not merely a physical challenge but a mental one. Odysseus must come to a moral reckoning in order to earn his place in his wife’s bed, on his throne and in the hearts of audiences.

That journey is rendered entirely in IMAX (the first film to do so) and practically – globe-trotting to stunning landscapes, filming in real locations tagged to the myths (the cyclops dwelling is Nestor’s Cave in the Greek Peloponnese) and special effects created in-camera and physically. Some uncanny-valley sad big cats, the cliff monster Scylla and aspects of single-eyed Polyphemus aside, this Greek blockbuster, richly lensed by Hoyte Van Hoytema, feels tactile, grounded, immersive and real. And though characters talk of gods, we only meet tangible, relatable deities. While the denizens of Olympus show their might in storms and strokes of fate, Athena (Zendaya), Calypso (Charlize Theron) and Circe (Samantha Morton in a cracking interpretation of the ‘men are pigs’ myth) appear as real women, and telling manifestations of Odysseus’ guilt, regret and PTSD. Their versions of womanhood are shown through the lens of a man who has abused women through war, misogyny and abandonment – and their mortal counterparts are granted agency and comment. Penelope doesn’t simply pine for her man, she exhibits ambition, rage and cunning, telling her son ‘in this world a man does what he wants, I do what I can’. Helen of Troy displays her disgust at being a possession, her twin Clytemnestra nurses bloody vengeance. Nolan has been criticised in the past for not writing great female parts and this feels like progress.

But, inescapably, men drive the narrative. Damon, leading after supporting in Interstellar and Oppenheimer, brings his Bourne physicality to a role that requires verisimilitude in battle – both in combat with giants, cyclops, Trojan forces and suitors, and internally as he struggles with amnesia, decisions of collateral damage and attempts to obey the moral code of the gods. It’s a performance that recalls Russell Crowe’s dextrous balance of grit and humanity in Gladiator and will likely net Damon similar accolades and gongs. His nemesis is given full baddie credentials by Pattinson, complete with delicious twitching eyes and pissy line reads (think Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) while Holland manages to mature from boy to man during the screentime and impress beyond his Spidey suit. In a stacked cast John Leguizamo shines as the loyal servant of Odysseus and audience proxy, Eumaeus. Though he’s seen chucking puppies off cliffs, his ethics are a guiding force in a world where betrayal, vengeance and power steals are commonplace.

As expected, Nolan’s take on Homer will withstand multiple viewings to appreciate all the moving parts and themes, but as a stand-alone cinema experience it’s the sort of crowdpleasing extravaganza that will invigorate audiences and prove the value of big screen entertainment. And, in an industry that increasingly wants to shrink cinema and replace human endeavour with AI, it’s a battle cry for artistry. As Nolan has one of his characters note in the finale: ‘songs will be all they have to remember those of us who can write’. Well, indeed.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy Universal Pictures
The Odyssey is in cinemas now

Screening Room

ROSEBUSH PRUNING

July 9, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Rich people are awful. F Scott Fitzgerald told us this. More recently Saltburn, Succession, How To Make A Killing… The wealthy family at the centre of Karim Aïnouz’s willfully quirky tale are, unsurprisingly, morally bankrupt and in the words of narrator, Edward (Callum Turner) ‘vapid egotists’. Edward is obsessed with luxury fashion labels, hitchhiking instead of driving and the idea of pruning a family like rosebushes. His need to downsize his relatives is driven by the hero worship of his brother Jack (Jamie Bell) who Ed determines should inherit the fortune of their blind, lascivious patriarch (Tracy Letts) with repugnant proclivities.

Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keogh, Pamela Anderson, Tracy Letts — Felix Dickinson/MUBI

The other family members who could stand in the way are a bitchy sister Anna (Riley Keough), – who has assumed the role of Mother in the absence of their own – and a listless brother Robert (Lukas Gage) who periodically suffers epileptic fits. The siblings’ Mum (played by Pamela Anderson with dazzling white teeth) was eaten by wolves and they now have a naked statue of her in their luxe pad in Catalonia. How droll. While Edward, Anna and Robert are incapable of finding connection outside of their incestuous family (Edward falls for a schlubby Greek doctor he meets randomly, Anna imagines come-ons from the local butcher and Robert is openly in love with his elder brother), Jack has met a regular girl (Elle Fanning) and could find happiness in a ritzy coastal mansion with her…

As Edward conspires to reduce his familial head count via a series of signposted finales, the dynasty show their teeth – literally and figuratively. Jack’s girlfriend is humiliated at a ‘meet the fam’ dinner (an entertaining scene that works better than the rest of the film), Anna competes, schemes and wears designer clothes, Robert betrays. There’s unpleasantness with a horse, dental hygiene obsession and dick pics – as conjured by Yorgos Lanthimos’ regular writing partner Efthimis Filippou. But this very much feels like Lanthimos-lite. Though it’s gorgeous-looking and well acted with an arch detachment (Turner as lead is like Brett Easton Ellis’ persona from The Shards), Rosebush Pruning feels as ephemeral as the fashion on display and as trite as the proverb Ed likes to collect. It’s satire without particular bite.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy MUBI
Rosebush Pruning is in cinemas now

Screening Room

THE INVITE

July 2, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

After her mauling and pile-on post Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde returns with a sharp, bittersweet observational comedy that shows Booksmart was no fluke. Proving herself both in front of and behind the camera, Wilde gifts audiences something of a throwback: a beautifully lensed, and played, grown-up experience on 35mm film with early Woody Allen vibes.

Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Penelope Cruz — A24

She plays Angela, an arty San Francisco mom and wife, married to music teacher, Joe (Seth Rogan). We first hear them over the opening titles, flirtatiously playing the same tune – a piano duet where they anticipate each key, bum notes laughed off. This was many years previously, because when we meet them in the present their synchronicity is lost, as people they are playing different melodies and keys. He’s pedalled grumpily home from a job he hates and she has spent the day procuring cheese, flowers and a new lounge rug; their distracted, snappy conversation in the hallway revealing the dynamic of their non-existent relationship.

Angela has invited the neighbours from upstairs over which Joe is resistant to and she is excited by. When they arrive, Piña (a peroxide Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) throw the differences between the couples into stark relief. The neighbours (who habitually have crazy loud sex upstairs), communicate in tender looks, Spanish whispers and lingering touch, exuding a ferocious vitality long missing from Joe and Angela’s co-existence. As the quartet talk in overlapping dialogue the horribly recognisable fissures in Joe and Angela’s relationship become obvious. The scalding look she gives him across the lounge is gold, the tart lines dished out, delicious. ‘This a very cold apartment,’ Angela tells the self-christened Hawk. ‘There’s not a lot of heat’. Well, quite.

As the evening unravels into radical honest, rolfing, sexual reveals, Sade tunes and Edward Norton nibbling jamon, The Invite takes unexpected turns and lands at a heartfelt moment as Pina, a sexologist, tells some home truths. As a four-hander played over a taut running time and in one set, it’s a testament to both writing and performance that every beat (funny and sad) lands. Co-written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (and based on Cesc Gay’s The People Upstairs) it’s by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, zinging along thanks to Wilde’s literally buttoned up people pleasing, MVP Rogen’s comic dexterity, Norton’s ability to walk a line between insufferable and sweet, and Cruz playing into fiery Spanish stereotypes.

Wilde’s eye for detail is evident in the sumptuous production design (the apartment is an LA soundstage but feels like a real, carefully curated space), Arianne Phillips’ storytelling costumes (Pina wears a big goddess ring, Angela matches the tasteful colour of her walls) and the way characters are framed by windows, doorways and the lens itself. Angela and Joe are rarely framed together, their estrangement physical, emotional, spiritual.

Loaded with social embarrassment, awkwardness, horniness and, ultimately, sadness, The Invite is a hoot – until it isn’t. Then it becomes something fragile and beautiful, a story of hope – and one that could easily be used by marriage counselling therapists as client homework (‘do you see how mean you are to each other?’ Pina asks her hosts). But that doesn’t mean you need to be in an imploding relationship to understand the social politics at play. Wilde’s film is an open house to anyone who’s ever forgotten wine at a dinner party, wondered about their neighbours, attempted to impress or thought dark thoughts about a partner during a gathering. Like The Drama earlier this year, The Invite is a wickedly bitter pill that gives hope that cinema can still produce such treats in an AI, franchise landscape.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of A24
The Invite is in cinemas now

Screening Room

SUPERGIRL

June 26, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

After catching a tantalising glimpse of hungover Supergirl in DC’s universe re-boot starter Superman last year – and meeting her pesky canine, Krypto – James Gunn gives us a feature length adventure with the 23 year-old Kara (Milly Alcock) from Krypton as she chases a McGuffin across galaxies and discovers her true potential. A shame then that the film does not realise its own promise of being a true girl (super)power movie and a convincing entry in the case for a revamped DC.

Milly Alcock, David Corenswet, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Momoa — Warner Bros. Pictures

We meet Kara on a birthday bender, bar-hopping from one intergalactic dive to another, chasing the bottom of a bottle on red sun planets where her powers are sapped so the booze hits harder. While her perky cousin Supes (David Corenswet) facetimes from earth to check on her status, she wears kookie sunglasses, doesn’t brush her hair and wears a ratty Blondie t-shirt to denote unresolved trauma – her primary-coloured suit discarded on the floor of her filthy spaceship. Kara needs a mission and she gets one when she crosses paths with a plucky teen girl, Ruthye (Eve Ridley) and the baddie who killed the kid’s family, Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). In the ruckus Kryto is poisoned and Kara has only 72 hours to find the antidote…

Along the way; a sex trafficking plot lifted from Fury Road, creatures that might be at home in The Mandalorian (including a Seth Rogan-voiced teeny cute alien) and Jason Momoa as Lobo, a bounty hunter with Kiss make-up and the role of encouraging the audience what to feel with snarky asides. He’s a literal cheerleader for Supergirl, turning up and commenting on her fighting prowess and spunk as she has similar (CG murky) fights on three different planets. Naturally she learns something about herself along the way, but it takes her 80 minutes to put on the suit.

With its female-led action and the genuinely charming Alcock in the cape, Supergirl could have been an exciting feminist take on the genre, digging into gender-specific emotional baggage and the specific scorn/criticism reserved for women in the public eye. But a clunky line about why Kara is Supergirl not Superwoman and skimming close to the Bechdel Test do not make a refreshing take. Women still exist in this world merely to be butchered, kidnapped and raped to further plot, and Supergirl only really comes alive when in counterpoint to Superman. The chats the duo have where he is all aw-shucks optimism to her world-weary sarcasm work so well that there’s guilt in wishing there was more of the Man of Steel. But based on Alcock’s verve and ability to elicit feels, the potential here isn’t wasted. She is the goodness shining in a dark world, in every way. Perhaps her next adventure will give her more to do.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Supergirl is in cinemas now

Screening Room

TOY STORY 5

June 19, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Pixar’s latest treatise on childhood and the importance of play couldn’t arrive at a more timely point as governments and society wrestle with the dangers of screen time and social media. The UK has decided to follow Australia’s suit in banning social media for under-16s and the physical toys in the studio’s beloved 30 year-old franchise have big things to say about real connection, imagination and nostalgia as they battle for kid attention with a wifi-ed screen. Easy pickings, but the film also plays parental/carer heartstrings like a harp with musings on letting go, becoming obsolete and the bittersweet joy of knowing a child no longer needs you.

Joan Cusack, Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Conan O’Brien — Pixar

With lanky cowboy doll Woody (Tom Hanks) having headed into the sunset with Bo (Annie Potts) last movie, this instalment focuses on new toybox leader Jessie (a returning Joan Cusack), and her relationships with her current and previous owners. Eight year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) now owns Jessie, faithful cloth steed Bullseye, space ranger Buzz (Tim Allen) and the rest of the inherited and found playthings. And unlike every other screen zombied kid in the neighbourhood she actually still plays with her toys. As Bonnie creates weddings and adventures in her backyard (whimsically animated in a hand-drawn style), the screens glow in the windows next door, preventing Bonnie from forming relationships. Concerned, her parents cave and buy a ‘Lily Pad’ (Greta Lee), an always-listening edu-tainment tablet hooked up to the web and pre-teen chatrooms. Bonnie is instantly addicted and drawn into cyber bullying, the false promise of internet friends and the yearning to grow up as quickly as possible.

Bonnie’s rejection of her toys fuels an SOS call to Woody, Bo and stunt action figure Duke Kaboom (Keanu Reeves) for some jokes about getting older (Woody has a paunch, bald spot and is indulging in mid-life crisis dressing) as well as an emotional journey for Jessie as she re-lives a previous dumping by a child called Emily. Inadvertently transported back to her former owner’s home, Jessie meets a trio of first-gen electronic gadgets: a potty trainer (Conan O’Brien), a camera (Shelby Rabara) and a GPS widget (Craig Robinson) plus a shelf full of toy horses and a squadron of Buzz Lightyears seeking their leader…

There’s plenty of gumption and toy gags to go at (Buzz riding a winged My Little Pony, drone excitement, a literally deflated flamingo in a garden ‘safe house’) and Cusack is a plucky antagonist who brings the joy. But there’s also the bone-deep sadness that we expect from Pixar – the moments that hit hard and require tissues. A nasty group-chat comment that stings, the discovery of generation love found in a hidden treasure trove, the lump-in-the-throat dedication of Bullseye, a realisation that parenting has been done well if your charge trots off without a backward glance… Like the much-loved hand-me-downs in Bonnie’s toy box, Pixar’s franchise might be a little frayed and well-used in its deployment of these narrative beats, but when it’s done this elegantly, who cares? And when the overriding message is not one of polarisation but of community – and finding your twin nerd in the world (Blaze voiced by Mykal-Michelle Harris) – it’s a film that not only feels suitable for family viewing, but necessary. Squeeze your kids and toys (however old they are) a little harder after the end-titles…

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of PIXAR
Toy Story 5 is in cinemas now

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