The Invite

Part of my coverage of the 13th Chicago Critics Film Festival

THE INVITE   ***

Olivia Wilde

2026

IDEA:  The already shaky relationship of a married 40-something couple is further rocked when they invite over their enigmatic upstairs neighbors. 

BLURB:  As long as there are human relationships, there will be appeal to stories like The Invite, which turns our social foibles into uproarious theater and reflects back at us the desires, fears, and frustrations that are difficult to confront, or even acknowledge, outside the safe outlet of art. Which is to say that The Invite is not unique (if a remake of a film based on a play could ever be called that!), but it is terribly evergreen, and it’s deftly attuned to both how gratifying and discomfiting it can be to watch relationship drama roil under the proverbial microscope. And boy does this cast have a field day with it! Each actor chews voraciously into Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s zesty script, lacing their deliveries and gestures with all manner of derision, passive aggression, or sexual desperation. Olivia Wilde nails the wild-eyed, fast-taking neuroticism and Seth Rogen the sarcastic, disillusioned surliness; as the disruptors, Penélope Cruz radiates sinuous, almost otherworldly sensuality while Edward Norton projects the calmly mysterious authority of a man’s man who’s also super into rugs. The near-constant interpersonal fracas is structured (literally) by the stylish production design, cinematography, and editing. The placement of an open window or a wall takes on heightened importance in a work so much about perspective, and how it often takes other people to show us different ways of looking at ourselves. This process results in quite the mess in The Invite, but the film poignantly suggests that sometimes it’s the mess that leads to the conversations that need to be had.

An Autumn Summer

AN AUTUMN SUMMER   **1/2

Jared Isaac

2025

IDEA:  Alongside family and friends, teen couple Kevin and Cody spend the summer together in Michigan before they have to part for college.

BLURB:  For all its familiarity or triteness as yet another bittersweet summer-before-college story, An Autumn Summer is a pretty wonderful evocation of the latter titular season. Isaac and DP Brandon Somerhalder capture a Michigan summer by the lake with a loving eye and palpable sense for the pleasures of long, idle days. They convey as much blissful warmth through sun-soaked frolics in the sand as they do in cozy story-times tucked away inside a cabin, both aglow in gold and amber hues. One particular sequence, a languid six-minute tracking shot across the beach at sunrise, is simply magical, the low sun casting a pastel haze over the young lovers and their cheerful friends. The chemistry and esprit de corps between these actors — and particularly between leads Mark McKenna and Lukita Maxwell — is so believable, lived-in, and passionate it’s easy to look past the fairly thin characterizations, or the curious casting of a man pushing 30 as an 18-year-old. Mood can go a long way in carrying a film, and An Autumn Summer sustains its buzzy estival vibes for most of its runtime, at least until the inevitable parting of its teen lovebirds brings the lurking melancholy to the fore. At this point, the film arrives at exactly where you knew it would, but it doesn’t make the preceding soft, genial summertime amble any less pleasing.

Diciannove

DICIANNOVE   ***1/2

Giovanni Tortorici

2024

IDEA:  The misadventures of a young Italian literature student in the mid-2010s. 

BLURB:  There’s more than a little Holden Caulfield in Leonardo Gravina, the 19-year-old protagonist of Giovanni Tortorici’s brash debut feature. At once insolent and erudite, he rants impotently about the perceived phoniness of academic authority and buries his insecurities under an air of moral superiority. Manfredi Marini imbues Leonardo with mercurial posture and temperament: he’ll appear as a callow, even cherubic kid one moment then as a hedonistic malcontent or hungry intellectual the next, confounding expectations of what a Gen Z adolescent — or any person, really — might be like, privately and publicly, in the lifelong process of becoming. Leonardo’s recalcitrance also calls to mind the Angry Young Men of the British New Wave, and his erratic impulses are cogently reflected in a cinematic style bursting with the invention of that and other contemporaneous New Waves. Diciannove is exhilarating in its formal play, where truly anything seems to go; slow motion, freeze frames, crash zooms, exaggerated camera angles, split screens, intertitles, and animation are just some of the devices with which Tortorici floods the screen. He deforms classical film grammar so thoroughly you genuinely can’t predict what the next shot will look like; it could just as easily be a character stepping over the camera on a sunlit Tuscan street as a viral video of live chicks falling into an incinerator. Accusations of indulgence write themselves, and it’s true the syntactic chaos sometimes feels driven by nothing more than randomness. But if this decadent stylistic gallimaufry were to work anywhere, one of the places would surely be a portrait of a curious, carnal, distracted, befuddled, overzealous young adult. The ostentatiousness of Diciannove is ultimately indivisible from its pleasures and meanings alike, channeling a restive period of young adulthood with potent affective force.

Los Olvidados

LOS OLVIDADOS   ***1/2

Luis Buñuel

1950

IDEA:  Trouble comes to a youth street gang in Mexico City when the gang's leader escapes from jail.

BLURB:  In keeping with a cinematic tradition of social realism, Los Olvidados is brief, blunt, and unremittingly bleak; it has little of Buñuel’s typical surrealism but all of his ferocious indignation at the inequities of capitalist, Christian society. The messaging is so overt that the film — which opens with stock footage and a voiceover describing how modern cities conceal “malnourished children without hygiene” and are a “breeding ground for future delinquents” — could be called didactic. But Buñuel is never so simplistic. Within the almost curtly abbreviated runtime, he depicts an underclass that is both victim and victimizer, with no noble hero to guide or palliate our identification. The common currency in this world is violence, promulgated between adults and children who have naturalized it as a means of survival. Buñuel avoids creating a false moral center; everyone enacts some form of abuse, whether it’s a mother scorning her son, kids ravaging a blind street performer, or the blind street performer, in turn, molesting a girl and even killing a man. It’s a merciless, stark picture, visually situated between the studio-bound chiaroscuro of Hollywood crime films and the ground-level vérité of Italian neorealism. Buñuel does offer some surrealist touches, such as an eerie slow-motion dream sequence and the mischievous punctum of the young protagonist throwing a raw egg right at the camera. As in some of De Sica’s films, these moments counterbalance and set into relief the deprivations of the characters’ reality, soberingly pointing up the humanity that dies in the darkness.

Exit 8

EXIT 8   **

Genki Kawamura

2025

IDEA:  When he discovers that he's trapped in a subway tunnel that inexplicably goes around in circles, a soon-to-be father needs to learn a game to find the exit.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Exit 8 reaches the peak of its intriguing eeriness in the first 15 minutes, when first-person filmmaking unnervingly puts us in the shoes of a man who finds he’s trapped in an infinitely looping subway tunnel. Replicating the logic of the video game, the zigzagging spatial layout creates suspense about what surprise might appear behind each monotonously white-tiled corner, while also posing a challenge to the player/viewer’s attention, memory, and perhaps even sanity. Does this maddeningly inescapable space represent the endless grind of workaday life under capitalism? Is it a purgatorial trial meant to test the moral fiber and flexibility of people who have made questionable life decisions? Yes and yes, as Exit 8 makes explicit in a script that has very little faith in its audience to understand subtext. The considerable tension and mystery built up by Kawamura quickly evaporate as more characters are introduced and the story fully flattens into the clichéd, moralizing parable of reluctant fatherhood it teased from the first of a hundred crying baby sounds. When the mute, cherubic “Boy” appears, it becomes groaningly obvious where this is headed, and what the protagonist will have to do to redeem himself and secure his escape. To their credit, Kazunari Ninomiya invests gravitas in his paper-thin protagonist-avatar, and Keisuke Imamura’s camerawork nimbly navigates shifting character perspectives and vectors in a confined space. It’s too bad they’re stuck serving a script that never really advances past Exit 1. 

Cure

CURE   ***1/2

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

1997

IDEA:  A Tokyo police detective investigates a mysterious case of a man who hypnotizes his victims into murder.

BLURB:  The concept of virality in so much horror fiction involves not only the fear of infection and transmission, but the instability of boundaries. Even when the ostensible contaminant seems to come from without, as in Cure, what is being transmitted is usually a contagion that was there all along, traveling within social and psychological structures it exposes as far more porous than we’d like to believe. Mamiya, for all his seeming alterity and strange malevolence, does not so much introduce a virus as draw out what is already insidiously contagious within late-20th-century Japanese society. Kurosawa teases out these sociocultural toxins with as much disquieting, methodical rigor as Mamiya lures his victims, piecing together a chilling portrait of a citizenry bound by emotional repression, obedience, historical amnesia, and self-negation. What is passed between the characters in and across the hushed frames — typically long-take wide shots that assume a perspective of clinical omniscience — is a condition of susceptibility. The self is contingent, not only on the social systems it operates within but on day-to-day encounters, influences, and suggestions that accumulate over time. It’s in these quotidian moments Cure locates its truly unsettling existential horror: the implication that just about anything, whether a vexingly gnomic drifter or a certain sensory stimulus, can alter consciousness. Kurosawa does his own subliminal magic on the viewer’s consciousness through constant doubling, mesmeric motifs (trickling water, flashing lights), elliptical edits, and a subtle ambient soundscape that make us question our perception of events. After all, what is film but a kind of hypnosis?