I've seen so many movies this month, I'm doing another two-fer for July! In this blog post I'm pretty much exclusively covering movies that came out this year. Next blog post will focus on some older films.
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The Invite
I generally avoid movies where the plot seems to be "a couple hates each other". Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff is one of my least-favorite movies because I really can't stand to listen to couples argue and bicker. But The Invite, written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and directed by Olivia Wilde, tempers the irritating aspects of this kind of film with a hefty dose of humor and surprise.
Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen play Angela and Joe: a married couple living in a really dope San Francisco apartment and raising a 12 year old daughter. Despite a very comfortable life, Angela and Joe have more than lost their spark: they borderline hate each other. Joe comes home from the job he clearly hates one day to find that Angela has invited their upstairs neighbors over for dinner. Despite Joe's protestations, it's too late to cancel: Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) are at the door.
The Invite walks this fine line between cringe and horny that I don't see a lot of movies do with finesse. Because, yes, Pina and Hawk are interested in Joe and Angela. And that interest, of course, flips everything on its head. Wilde gives an excellent performance as a woman overflowing with anxiety...and secretly filled with desire. Wilde pivots from anger to flirtation to embarrassment to resignation on a dime but in a way that feels really real. Because I know women like her: brimming with emotions and trying to keep them under control, but waiting for the right moment, or the right person, to free them.
Ed Norton is also great as the sensitive New Age guy. The type of guy who is soft-spoken and smart and deferential to women...but who is also kind of a fuck monster. I feel like Norton is uniquely perfect for this role because he embodies this version of masculinity that is a bit pretentious and annoying, but also...kinda hot? (hey, maybe it's just me). Hot in a way where you're annoyed about it and would be embarrassed to admit to your friends that you sat on his face all night long.
Rogen and Cruz are also great, though they do lean into their stereotypes (Cruz as a cool sex goddess and Rogen as a sarcastic, funny guy with a mean streak) a bit. But overall, the cast just works SO WELL together. I love it when actors are good at acting!
The Invite is really, really hilarious with a clever script, great directing, excellent acting, and something to actually say about relationships.
Grade: A
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Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
This delightful little comedy is the latest from David Wain, the director and writer of Wet Hot American Summer, Wanderlust, and They Came Together. I don't think I've seen a David Wain film I didn't like! His style of humor is this interesting mix of sweet and edgy. His movies also reward multiple views--they tend to grow on me more and more when I rewatch them.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is also a take on The Wizard of Oz, a fact I didn't pick up on until halfway through the movie! A hairdresser from rural Kansas, Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), is about to marry her high school sweetheart, Tom (Michael Cassidy). But when Tom has an opportunity to use his "celebrity sex pass" and takes it (Gail catches him mid-act), Gail starts to doubt whether she should go through with the wedding.
While on a trip to Los Angeles with her best friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), Gail visits a psychic who explains that to save her relationship she must even the score by sleeping with her celebrity sex pass: Jon Hamm. So begins an adventure to find Jon Hamm and, well, fuck him. There's also a parallel plot where Gail accidentally takes the wrong suitcase at the airport and some bad guys need to hunt her down to retrieve the classified documents she inadvertently stole.
Gail Daughtry is goofy, dumb, and good-hearted. On their quest to meet Jon Hamm, Gail and Otto meet three men: Caleb (Ben Wang), who works at a creative agency and is a bit of a dummy; Vincent (Ken Marino, also the screenwriter of the movie), a former paparazzo who has lost his heart for his work; and John Slattery (John Slattery), Hamm's co-star from Mad Men who is a bit of a coward. GET IT??
It's cute. I'm looking forward to watching it again and revisiting Wain's previous films and also the ones I haven't seen yet. While I wasn't busting my gut laughing at this movie, I did laugh out loud a lot in the theatre. Check it out if you're in the mood for a loose, silly comedy.
Grade: B+
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The Sheep Detectives
Watch this movie immediately! Seriously, go watch it now!
Directed by Kyle Balda, who has a long career in animation, The Sheep Detectives is a family-friendly film about a group of sheep who need to figure out who murdered their shepherd, George (Hugh Jackman). The movie is basically an Agatha Christie novel, but with talking sheep.
And if you think a PG-rated movie with talking sheep isn't for you--I thought that, too! And I was wrong. The story is absolutely heartrending at times and covers some pretty deep themes, including being a friend to the unloved, caring for your "flock" (and allowing them to care for you), and not avoiding painful feelings and memories. One interesting aspect of the sheep (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris O'Dowd, Patrick Stewart, and Bryan Cranston, among others) is that they can choose to forget things. So if something bad happens, they can simply...forget it. All of the sheep, that is, except Mopple (O'Dowd), who can't forget and therefore is in a painful position to bear the burden of remembering all the bad things that happened to the flock. The lesson the sheep have to learn is that if a loved one dies, like George, it's worth it to remember him, as painful as it is, because remembering loved ones is how they stay with us. I'm not crying--you're crying!
The mystery itself is a bit silly, but it does introduce us to a colorful cast of (human) characters--each with a reason to do harm to George. A bumbling police officer (Nicholas Braun) is able to solve the case with the help of the sheep. And the sheep are able to solve the case because George read them murder mysteries before bed each night!
If you've ever thought, "I'd love to watch a movie that is a combination of Babe and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery", well this is the movie for you! But it's probably also for you if you've never thought that, because everyone I know, from casual moviegoers to cinephiles, like The Sheep Detectives.
Grade: A
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Faces of Death (2026)
The original Faces of Death is a 1978 horror film presented as a documentary claiming to show "real" executions, animal attacks, and war. Some of the footage was real, and some of it was fake, but it was presented as entirely real and became a sort of underground cult classic. I myself have not seen it and have no interest in seeing it.
The 2026 film Faces of Death is about a woman, Margot (Barbie Ferreira), hired to do content moderation for an app called Kino (basically, a fictional TikTok) and discovers what she believes are real murders filmed to look fake so they will pass moderation. The murders are recreations of scenes from--you guessed it--the 1978 film Faces of Death. Although Margot's coworkers tell her to let it go, she decides to solve the mystery before more people die.
This is just a bad movie. It's dumb as hell, and worse, it's boring. It's not violent or scary enough to be an entertaining horror film, and it's not tense enough to be a good thriller. What's bizarre, though, is that the director, Daniel Goldhaber, is a really good director! He directed Cam, which I really enjoyed, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is an excellent movie. Likewise, Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery (who plays the killer) are talented actors. So this is just kind of a low point for everyone involved.
Faces of Death isn't the worst movie ever, but I really can't recommend it. There are better ways to spend 97 minutes.
Grade: C
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