YNOT at the Movies

The Czech-born Jewish German-language writer Franz Kafka spent his life feeling like an outsider in his own story, and Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland's new biopic "Franz" (Czech Republic/Poland/Germany/France/Turkey 2025 | in German/Czech | 127 min.) never quite lets an audience feel otherwise. The director once turned a Jewish teenager's survival inside the Hitler Youth into the wrenching "Europa Europa" (1990). Her latest film turns to a subject who never had to hide from anyone but himself. The picture has become a genuine sensation back home, sweeping nominations at this year's Czech Lion Awards. Holland deserves credit for attempting a fractured, non-chronological portrait instead of a conventional cradle-to-grave biopic, even if that ambition rarely catches fire on screen.

Franz Kafka (Idan Weiss) is sketched here as a mosaic rather than a linear biography, hopping between his prickly, impulsive youth under the roof of his domineering father Hermann (Peter Kurth) and his adult years fumbling through love affairs and a day job he despised. There are stretches where that fragmented approach genuinely captures a man who never experienced his own life as a tidy narrative. But the film keeps reaching past even that structure, cutting forward again into the present day to show tourists filing through the Kafka museum, and the seams between eras show. It's a clever idea in theory. In practice it undercuts the very gravity the film is trying to build, since it has to keep borrowing from Kafka's modern fandom to convince us the man mattered in the first place.

The bigger problem is Tomasz Naumiuk's camera, which treats a dinner table scene like something to be swung through rather than composed. It whips from face to face with a restlessness that reads as disorienting more often than expressive, and by the second act the constant movement becomes exhausting rather than immersive. Combined with a Kafka who is written as difficult to warm to on purpose, eccentric, impulsive, and often unlikeable, the film has trouble giving an audience anywhere to land.

Weiss commits fully to that prickliness, and there's a real performance buried in his fidgeting, wounded stares. But a biopic that keeps its subject at arm's length needs either a formal control the camerawork doesn't have, or a magnetism the writing doesn't give him.

What's stranger still is how little the film is interested in the words that made Kafka worth a movie at all. For a story about a writer, the film spends almost no time asking why the writing mattered, what made it strange, or why it outlived him. Watching it feels like picking up a handsome mug at the museum shop as a souvenir: proof that you were there, without any real understanding of the writer or his work, and why Franz's name is on the mug.

"Franz" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, August 21, 2026.

When Anthony Bourdain was 19-year-old, he had no book deal, no show, no reputation, just a girl he followed to the end of Cape Cod and no idea what he would do there. Director Matt Johnson's "Tony" (USA 2026 | 106 min.) captures him entirely in that moment, decades before the writer, the TV host, or the death that tragically closed the book on him.

Nineteen-year-old Tony (Dominic Sessa) is someone hard to root for on the surface: a smooth talker, a frequent liar, a kid getting by on charm because he hasn't built anything real yet. He follows Nancy (Emilia Jones), a girl from his high school he has a crush on, to Provincetown, knowing nobody and with nowhere to go. He talks his way into washing dishes for Chef (Antonio Banderas), the restaurateur running a small seafood spot, and it's Tony's first job in any kitchen. Without a place to stay, he ends up camping out on Chef's patio for an extended stretch, not even inside the house. It's that one impulsive decision, none of it makes sense in hindsight, that quietly sets up the rest of his life. The film never over-explains this irony. It just lets you sit with how little Tony understands about what he's actually doing.

What does come through is the courage underneath the recklessness. Broke, unqualified, and with no real plan, Tony still throws himself at the opportunity in front of him instead of retreating to something safer. Whether or not you like him at the moment, that instinct to leap first and figure it out later reads as the seed of the person he'd become. The film trusts the audience to feel that connection rather than spelling it out.

Where the story gets shakier is Tony's relationship with Chef. Chef takes Tony under his wing almost immediately after they meet, even letting Tony sleep on his property, despite Tony having zero kitchen experience, and gives him little reason to be trusted. The film wants this mentorship to feel like it makes sense, but it never quite shows us what Chef sees in this kid before Tony has done anything to deserve it. It's a gap the film asks you to fill in yourself, and not every viewer will.

Sal (Leo Woodall) is the film's most alive presence, a coworker who embodies every temptation and bad habit that runs through restaurant kitchens. Woodall plays Sal with a loose, confident and dangerous charisma that makes every scene he's in mesmerizing. It feels like Sal could tip into chaos at any second in life while being the most trusted person in the kitchen, and it's easily the standout performance here.

However, the burning question is who this film is really for. Knowing where young Tony ends up is what makes you extend him grace even when he's lying to someone's face or making a mess of his own life. Strip that knowledge away and what's left is a coming-of-age story about an unremarkable, not especially likable kid stumbling through a summer. That's not necessarily a flaw, but it does mean the film is working with a built-in safety net that a viewer unfamiliar with Anthony Bourdain simply won't have.

It's hard to imagine that going to Provincetown pursuing a girl from school completely shaped Anthony Bourdain's life and career, and this film succeeds in telling that captivating story with a terrific ensemble cast.

"Tony" opens on Friday, August 7, 2026 in New York and Los Angeles, and in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, August 21, 2026.

Two men in a dungeon, trading theories about a string of impossible murders, prove far more compelling than any battlefield could. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner (黒牢城 | Japan 2026 | in Japanese | 147 min.) is his first period film after five decades spent almost entirely in the present tense. That history matters, because the instinct that made him a master of contemporary dread hasn't left him: he's just pointed it at the 16th century.

Set in 1578, Lord Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) has rebelled against the tyrannical warlord Nobunaga Oda (Bando Shingo) and barricaded himself inside Arioka Castle. Oda's army surrounds the walls, but the more immediate threat comes from inside them: a string of killings nobody can explain, each one chipping away at what's left of Murashige's authority over his own court. Cut off from easy answers, he turns to Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), a rival strategist he's holding prisoner in the dungeon. The alliance is transactional and wary, and increasingly the only thing keeping the castle from tearing itself apart.

Kurosawa stages almost all of it as conversation, often like detectives working a case in the present day. The two men talk through each death methodically, and the film builds its tension out of deduction rather than swordplay, closer to a locked-room mystery than a war picture. It's an unusual register for a story set against a siege, and it pays off: the scale of the war outside stays constant and looming while the actual drama narrows to two men working out who's lying to whom. Every space in the castle, dungeon included, is shot with the same spare, theatrical precision, so the mystery never feels smaller than the history surrounding it.

Motoki plays Murashige's unraveling with real control, a lord who starts the film certain of his own authority and ends it questioning nearly everything about it. Suda gets the showier part: Kanbei shifts registers from ally to threat within a single scene, and he's convincing in both directions, which is exactly what the role demands. Yuriko Yoshitaka, as Murashige's wife Chiyoho, has less screen time but delivers the film's most direct emotional beat late on. The film keeps circling back to an old Buddhist phrase, "advance to paradise, retreat into hell," which hangs over Murashige as a kind of warning against turning back. Chiyoho answers it herself near the end, telling him "there is paradise even for those who retreat," and it reframes everything he's been agonizing over.

At two and a half hours, this is a long sit, but the length works in the film's favor rather than against it. The drama keeps unfolding in small increments, one revelation stacked on the next, and the time passes without announcing itself.

There's a gravity to the whole thing that recalls watching a stage production of Shakespeare, actors working through a slow accumulation of betrayal in a single set rather than a movie padding itself out. It's an absorbing watch throughout, and it never loses its grip. Anyone who knows Kurosawa mainly through Cure (1997) will recognize the same patient unease here, just relocated four centuries back.

"The Samurai and the Prisoner" opens in theaters on Friday, July 31, 2026 in New York and Los Angeles, expanding to other cities in the following weeks, and at the Roxie theater on Friday, August 14, 2026.

Superhero sequels rarely bother chasing real drama, so it's a nice surprise when one manages a story that actually hangs together alongside the expected spectacle. Director Destin Daniel Cretton pulls that off in "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" (USA 2026 | 145 min.), even if the film never asks you to believe too hard in the specifics.

If you're scared of heights, you won't envy Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Spider-Man. At the end of "Spider-Man: No Way Home" (2021), Doctor Strange cast a spell erasing the entire world's memory of Peter Parker to keep the people he loves safe: MJ (Zendaya), his one-time girlfriend, and everyone else who once knew him personally, no longer remember he exists. Spider-Man himself is still a celebrated fixture of the city, out swinging over Manhattan and saving people daily. What's gone is Peter, the person underneath the mask. That split, adored by the city, invisible to everyone who used to love him, gives the film a solid emotional thread to work from, even when the plot around it doesn't always earn the feeling.

The action mostly delivers. Several set pieces are well staged, with visual effects work that makes the rooftop chases and mid-air catches feel physically dangerous rather than weightless, though a couple of the later sequences blur together and lean on scale more than they need to.

Holland handles the material well, letting the performance sit in real discomfort rather than smoothing it into easy heroics. Ned (Jacob Batalon) is the film's reliable scene-stealer, and every one of his beats lands the way the franchise has trained audiences to expect since "Spider-Man: Homecoming" (2017).

None of this makes the plot especially plausible, and the film knows it, moving fast enough that you don't usually stop to poke holes in it. At two and a half hours, though, it pushes its welcome further than the story needs; a tighter cut closer to 100 minutes would have kept the momentum without losing anything that works.

Nevertheless, it's a well done film that fills a couple of hours with fun entertainment where the story treats its heightened dangers as entirely real, and lets you go along with that instead of thinking about the actual war unfolding in reality right now.

"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" opens in theaters on Friday, July 31, 2026.

Renowned write-director Hirokazu Koreeda's new film "Sheep in the Box" (箱の中の羊 | Japan 2026 | in Japanese | 126 min.) has many ingredients of his best work: a grieving family, a watchful child, an unresolved wound. What it doesn't have is the effort to pick a direction and follow it.

Koreeda has covered this emotional territory before, and covered it better. "After Life" (1998) turned death into a philosophical puzzle box. "Still Walking" (2008) and "Shoplifters" (2018) found the drama inside ordinary family routines. "Nobody Knows" (2004) and "Monster" (2023) both trusted children to carry the story itself. A film about android replacements for the dead has also already been made brilliantly, in Kogonada's "After Yang" (2021). "Sheep in the Box" "Sheep in the Box" seems to want to be all of these films at once, touching on grief, family, childhood friendship, and artificial intelligence in turn, but it never settles into any one of them long enough to say something new.

Two years after losing their young son Kakeru, architect Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke Komoto (Daigo Yamamoto), a carpenter, bring a humanoid modeled on their dead Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) into their home. The company that built the humanoid rents these replacements out to bereaved families. The robot looks, moves, and talks exactly like Kakeru, and Otone welcomes him readily while Kensuke resists. His presence starts to bring back some sense of the old time in the house, even if Kensuke's early resentment makes clear that nothing about this is actually normal. Watching that dynamic shift between the humanoid and the parents is the most interesting thing in the film, but it also drags up wounds and regrets neither parent has dealt with.

The director has said the film grew out of news stories about Chinese companies using generative AI to revive the dead, and about a Japanese broadcast that used similar technology to bring back a deceased singer for a new performance. He's drawn the title from the novel "The Little Prince," using it as a way of asking whether something invisible, such as a soul, survives inside a machine built to look like a lost child. But the film raises that question and then declines to follow through on it.

The future depicted in the film doesn't extend past the humanoid himself. Everything else, the houses, the offices, the TV news reports about children going missing, looks like the present. That narrowness might have worked if the film used its restraint to dig into the parents' grief instead, but it hedges there too, and the result is a story with likeable people in an intriguing situation that never risks going anywhere uncomfortable.

Ayase plays Otone's need to believe with real tenderness, and Yamamoto, better known in Japan as a comedian than an actor, finds a wary, unshowy resistance in Kensuke that suits the character's slower path toward accepting the robot. The film's real discovery is Rimu Kuwaki, making his screen debut as Kakeru's humanoid after being chosen out of two hundred children who auditioned. Koreeda has always had a gift for directing kids, and he gets something genuinely eerie and touching out of Kuwaki, who has to play warmth and a faint, unplaceable wrongness in the same scene.

As in most of Koreeda's films, there's no real villain here, aside from the implied threat of child abductors mentioned on the news. He'd rather make you feel for everyone in the frame than give you someone to root against, and that instinct still works even when the larger story doesn't.

It's frustrating to watch this film from a director who's usually so sure-footed, but even for this lesser Koreeda film, it has more feeling in it than most, and there's enough tenderness and craft here to make it worth seeing, especially for the director's longtime admirers.

"Sheep in the Box" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, July 31, 2026.

Boaz spends the first half of writer-director Moshe Rosenthal's sophomore feature "Tell Me Everything" (עצמאות | Israel/France/UK 2026 | in Hebrew | 109 min.) learning a secret, and the second half learning what to do with it. Rosenthal treats those as two different movies, one about discovery and one about repair, and the film is stronger for keeping them separate rather than rushing Boaz toward some tidy understanding.

It's 1987 in Tel Aviv, and Boaz (Yair Mazor) is a scrawny kid a few months out from his bar mitzvah, a coming of age ritual in Judaism. He is closer to his mother Bella (Keren Tzur), a beautician, than to his father Meir (Assi Cohen), a cab driver who also runs a furniture store. Boaz shares a room with his two older sisters, and the whole apartment hums with 80s hits off a boombox, the era's big hair, and shoulder pads. The film spends time letting that household feel warm before it takes the warmth apart. When Boaz stumbles onto the truth about his father, with AIDS already a distant but terrifying headline on the evening news, he tells his family what he saw, and the fallout pushes Meir out of his life entirely.

The back half jumps to 1996, when Boaz (Ido Tako) is twenty-one. He's been admitted to university in Jerusalem but is still sleeping in his mother's living room, working at a gas station that isn't enough to get him out. He carries longing, resentment, guilt, and regret for the father he hasn't seen since his bar mitzvah, all of it tangled together. It's heartbreaking to watch him try to sort through it without much help from anyone around him.

Rosenthal and his production and costume teams recreate the family's world in fine detail, the apartment, the clothes, even the sidewalks outside, the texture of a working-class Tel Aviv household in the late '80s. The move to '90s is handled with the same care, tracking how both Boaz's own feelings and the culture's attitude toward gay people have shifted with the years.

Mazor is the film's real discovery. Before the truth about his father comes out, this Boaz plainly admires the man, and it's in the boy's inquisitive stares, watching, working things out, that the film locates a child's mind still catching up to what's in front of it. Tako, picking up the role as the character enters his twenties, plays that tangle of longing, resentment, guilt, and regret without ever resolving it into something simpler than it is.

A few too many of the second half's turns depend on Boaz being in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, and the coincidences start to show through the emotional groundwork Rosenthal has otherwise laid so carefully. It doesn't undo the film, but it does mean the raw feeling on screen is doing more of the persuading than the story is.

"Tell Me Everything" marks Rosenthal's second time opening the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), following "Karaoke" (2022) at SFJFF42. This year's edition of SFJFF, the 46th, is the festival's largest yet, with 65 films from 17 countries and a record eight world premieres. The festival closes Saturday, August 1, at the Piedmont Theatre with the documentary "We Met at Grossinger's" (2025) and the next day it screens this year's winners for the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Award, Best First Feature Award, and Audience Awards for documentary and narrative.

"Tell Me Everything" opens the 46th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on July 16, 2026 at the Herbst Theatre, with a second Bay Area screening July 29, 2026, at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland.

Director Christopher Nolan spent sixteen years chasing an all-IMAX feature, and he finally made "The Odyssey" (UK/USA 2026 | 172 min.). Like the incredible journey told in the film, the film itself is incredible to watch in the 70mm format on IMAX, a genuine spectacle, shot across six countries (Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and the U.S.) with real ships and thousands of extras on a burning set.

The film adapts Homer's ancient Greek epic poem, one of the foundational texts of Western literature, believed to have been composed around the 8th century BCE. It follows Odysseus (Matt Damon), king of Ithaca, in the years after the Trojan War, as he tries to sail home and is instead dragged through a series of hostile gods, monsters, and supernatural islands. The Trojan War itself was sparked when a young Trojan man took Helen (Lupita Nyong'o), queen of Sparta, from her husband Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and brought her back to Troy.

Back in Ithaca, Odysseus's wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off a palace full of suitors pressuring her to remarry, led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson), while their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) comes of age searching for any word that his father is still alive. After a few years, Odysseus defies the gods and endures tremendous ordeals to complete the journey back home.

The filmmaking is exceptional. Whether it's the massed torchlight of the sack of Troy or the real ocean crossings on a genuine Norwegian longship, Nolan's commitment to shooting practically shows up on screen in a way visual effects alone couldn't fake. Nolan shot the entire film with IMAX film cameras, a first for a fiction feature, using a newly engineered camera housing (nicknamed "the blimp," later renamed The Keighley) that finally solved the decades-old problem of the camera being too loud to record dialogue on set. You feel that scale in every frame.

The performances are top notch throughout. Lupita Nyong'o takes on a dual role as both Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae, finding distinct notes in two women trapped in very different marriages. Matt Damon never smiles once during the entire movie. He plays a sad warrior, a man worn down by ten years of war before the movie even gives him room to grieve it.

However, the mystery might be a bit hard to understand, particularly what the monsters and gods actually are and why they're attacking the warriors. Viewers unfamiliar with Homer's book may find it challenging to keep up with figures like the witch Circe (Samantha Morton), the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), and the goddess Athena (Zendaya), who repeatedly intervenes on Odysseus's behalf, without much scaffolding for who they are or what they want.

You can also mirror the war in the movie with reality here, and it resonates. The invasion and conquest at the heart of the story lives on in thousands of years of human history, even though this particular story isn't quite real Greek history to begin with. That tension between myth and modern recognition is what makes the siege of Troy land as more than spectacle.

Homer's poem took generations of oral storytellers to become myth. Nolan's version needed six countries, a 300-pound camera, and a cast and crew willing to row real oars and hike real hillsides to make it real. Both were worth it.

"The Odyssey" opens in theaters on Friday, July 17, 2026.

A live-action remake that spends most of its runtime rendered in computer graphics is not a live-action remake. It's a cartoon with a bigger budget and a straighter face, and that contradiction sits at the center of everything wrong with "Moana" (USA 2026 | 115 min.).

The story hasn't changed. Moana (Catherine Laga'aia), the future chief of the island of Motunui, defies her father's warnings and sails past the reef with the disgraced demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) to return a stolen heart to the mother island Te Fiti and lift a curse strangling her people's home. It's a clean adventure structure, one that worked well in 2016's animated film. This version treats that structure as a formality to clear before the visual effects team takes over.

And the CGI takes over constantly. Heihei the rooster, Te Kā the lava demon, entire ocean sequences: all obviously generated, none of it earning the promise the film's marketing keeps making. If the plan was always to animate most of the movie, the question is why bother restaging it as live-action at all.

The human performances don't pick up the slack. Catherine Laga'aia has been billed as a discovery, and there are flickers of screen presence in her early scenes on Motunui, but once the voyage starts she and Dwayne Johnson both go flat, running through beats rather than feeling them. Rena Owen's Gramma Tala should be the emotional hinge of the whole film and instead reads like she wandered in from a different, warmer cut. This is a story that only works if you're concerned for a teenager alone on the open ocean, and none of the performances make you feel it.

The direction doesn't help. Scenes cut before they take a foot hold, edited with the nervous energy of a slideshow that doesn't trust any single image to hold attention. It's an odd choice for a story about slowing down long enough to listen to an ocean, a grandmother, an ancestor.

The songs don't help either. None of the new material locks into a hook, and the film seems to lose its nerve about being a musical partway through, cutting between numbers and straight dialogue like it isn't sure which movie it's making. A musical that keeps second-guessing whether it's a musical isn't going to convince anyone else either.

Even smaller logic gaps stop mattering to the filmmakers. Moana and Maui split half a banana at one point and that's the only meal either of them is shown eating across a multi-day open-ocean journey. It's a nothing detail on its own, but it's symptomatic: nobody making this movie seems especially interested in whether any of it holds together, because the CGI spectacle is doing all the work they think they need.

The costuming and production design are the one place the film actually delivers, and it's a shame that work is stuck inside a story that doesn't care about its own details. Everything else feels like a duplication of the 2016 animated film with a bigger budget and less nerve, a remake that can't decide whether it wants to exist as its own thing or just resell you the original with a straighter face.

"Moana" opens in theaters on Friday, July 10, 2026.

The little yellow henchmen have never been funnier than when they mess up their villainous masters' tasks in ridiculous ways in the first half of "Minions & Monsters" (USA 2026 | 90 min.), and the movie shines brightest when it's paying tribute to cinema history. This delightfully charming new chapter feels breezy and fun, delivering more laughs than the franchise has managed in a long time.

This new film sends a tribe of Minions on the same doomed errand that has always defined the species: find the most evil boss imaginable and serve him until everything falls apart. The list is quite long: a cyclops, a mummy, a pirate, an ancient ruler, and a sorcerer. Of course, every gig has ended in catastrophe. It's all narrated in cheerful retrospect by a museum guide named Olivia (voiced by Allison Janney), who claims this is all true and clearly loves how insane that sounds.

This time, the story follows four new characters, all voiced by the film's director Pierre Coffin: Dick, the self-proclaimed leader who treats the evil boss hunt like a sacred calling, and the more wayward trio of James, Henry and Ed. Their search lands them in 1920s Hollywood, where they crash a film set run by Max (voiced by Christoph Waltz), who assumes for a moment that his career just went up in flames.

Instead, the studio's fat bosses (both voiced by Jeff Bridges) spot star power in the Minions. Silent film rewards exactly what these creatures already do best: big feelings, bigger gestures, zero need for a script. The Minions instantly become the unlikeliest movie stars in Hollywood. Then the talking pictures arrive, and the same instincts that made them famous suddenly can't keep them employed. The town that adored them moves on quickly.

None of that backstory matters as much as how it actually feels to watch. The stretch built around the tribe's doomed boss search is the loosest, silliest, and funniest filmmaking these characters have gotten in years. What it taps into is close to the heart: the specific, gleeful chaos of being a kid who knows exactly how much trouble they're about to cause and does it anyway.

This is also where the film is most alive, in its love letter to cinema history. The silent comedy stretches play like the work of a scholar who studied the deadpan precision of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin's physical comedy, and it shows the deepest affection for early Hollywood.

Whether they've got one eye or two, all the Minions are irresistibly cute. Director Pierre Coffin's gibberish baby voice is both amusing and adorable. It sounds as if it's speaking many languages at once, but more often sounds suspiciously like Italian, and even throwing in Mandarin's "thank you" for fun. It comes out as pure, undeniable mischief rather than noise for its own sake.

The trouble starts once the studio moves on and James refuses to. He has fallen hard for moviemaking, and rather than let it go, he talks Henry and Ed into helping him build a monster picture out of his own sketchbook, working from an old boss's stolen spell book.

Here is where the film starts losing the energy that made it funny and adorable. Once the story commits fully to monster territory, the Minions stop being gleeful screwups and start being heroes with a planet to save, and a movie that had been running on mischief suddenly needs its characters to behave and save the world. The chaos gets tidier. The jokes get safer.

None of it collapses, but the air noticeably leaves the room. It doesn't help that the film keeps cutting away from James, Henry and Ed's monster movie to check in on Dick's half of the tribe, who stumble onto Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a stiff, monotone robot they mistake for their next boss, a character who should have been left out of the movie entirely. Every cut back to it pulls focus from the scrappier, funnier story the Minions are working so hard to tell. It feels like a detour that was allowed to compete with the main event instead of supporting it.

However, that is not enough to sink the experience. Even with a back half that loses its nerve, this is generous, good-natured entertainment built with real craft and obvious affection for movie history, and it never stops being fun to look at. With the heat outside and the depressing news feed around the world, this movie makes the perfect escape.

"Minions & Monsters" opens in theaters on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.

Oscar Wilde kicks things off; Olivia Wilde brings it home. "The Invite" (USA 2026 | 107 min.) opens with a line from the legendary master of wit:

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Then, for the remaining of its running time, the movie tries to prove him right, with plenty of laughs, deliciously awkward moments, and a kind of raw honesty many comedies are too scared to touch.

Joe (Seth Rogen) is a former indie musician who now teaches for a steady paycheck. His wife, Angela (Olivia Wilde), decides to invite their upstairs neighbors over, without bothering to warn him. The neighbors are the breezy confident and easy charming Hawk (Edward Norton) and his therapist partner Piña (Penélope Cruz). They show up like philosophical provocateurs instead of casual neighbors. The rest of the evening is nothing like everyone has expected it to be.

What keeps the film interesting is how fluidly the dynamics shift among these four. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from writer-director Cesc Gay's "The People Upstairs" (Sentimental | Spain 2020), the film has an earned, unforced rapport at its center that came out of an intensive pre-shoot workshop between director and cast. The alliances in the apartment change so much that feel both absurd and completely true to life. By the end, the lines between therapist and patient, guest and host, liberated and repressed, have blurred beyond recovery.

All four leads are terrific with perfect timing. Seth Rogen might be both the funniest and saddest he's ever been; Joe's dry humor turns heartbreaking before you can even spot the shift. Olivia Wilde is revelatory as the wounded Angela, trying desperately to steer an evening she has already lost control of. Edward Norton brings heart to a character who, let's be honest, might not even deserve it. And Penélope Cruz? She's perhaps the most purely pleasurable to watch: a therapist who deploys candor as a weapon and warmth as a trap.

The film's jokes are grown-up in the best way—sharp, specific, unflattering, and pointed straight at anyone who's ever bargained with themselves in marriage. Some jokes sting, and that sting feels uncomfortably familiar. The cringe and the laugh are the same reflex here.

The movie takes place in a San Francisco apartment, and the city appears just long enough at the opening to remind you how much it might have given the film, the fog, the hills, and the light. If you were lucky enough to catch it at the Castro Theatre during the opening night at the 69th SFFILM Festival, you might well have wished the homecoming had more of the City in it. The apartment, though, is gorgeous, all soft blues and greens against fancy ceilings and moldings. However, that's more like a theater stage setting, not really for cinema.

Still, the film shows its intelligence and mostly delivers its laughs, and if it sacrifices San Francisco for a living room, what happens in that living room turns out to be worth the trade. This is the adult comedy the summer needed.

"The Invite" opens in theaters on Friday, July 2, 2026.