The opening of Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review of Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite:
“When you catch a movie about two couples who get together for a dinner party, there are certain expectations. You expect that the dialogue, for a while, is going to be light, funny, brittle, caustic. You expect that as the evening wears on, the masks of civility will come off, revealing something more painful and maybe brutal under the surface. You expect that there might be serious flirtation (between the people who aren’t partners), and that the whole thing will wind up structured as a kind of truth game. And you expect that by the end, there will be wreckage…but maybe, in that destruction, a kind of healing.
“The Invite, directed by Wilde from a script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones and starring Wilde and Seth Rogen as a grousing, long-married San Francisco couple who have their upstairs neighbors over to dinner, is a movie that lives up to every one of those expectations. Yet it does so in a way that’s so original, so brimming with surprise, so fresh and up-to-the-minute in its perceptions of how relationships work (or don’t), that you watch it in a state of rapt immersion and delight.”