Olivia's wild sex comedy is an orgy of mischievous fun! BRIAN VINER on The Invite

The Invite (15, 107 mins)

Rating: Four stars 

Verdict: Hilarious four-hander

's wordy relationship comedy The Invite is at times reminiscent of peak . I know that's not everyone's idea of lofty praise, but it is mine.

Her film is intermittently hilarious, sad and thought-provoking, and many married couples will find it at least partly relatable, even those of us whose neighbours have never proposed what in a less sensitive age used to be known as a gang-bang.

Smartly written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, it is impeccably acted by a cast of just four: Wilde herself, , and .

Wilde plays nervy, unhappy Angela, whose marriage to Joe (Rogen), a disillusioned music teacher at an obscure college, has become one long bickering session. 

Ostensibly, their 12-year-old daughter is the reason they have stayed together. In truth, they have both been sapped even of the will to break up.

The story unfolds in more or less real time over the course of an evening.

Joe gets back to their apartment to find that, with their daughter away on a sleepover, Angela has invited their upstairs neighbours, Pina (Cruz) and Hawk (Norton), for dinner.

He is aghast. He doesn't want their company, he just wants them to stop having disruptively noisy sex in the middle of the night, which he explains to his child by telling her they're moving furniture.

The dinner is a disaster. Angela hasn't asked about Pina's food intolerances – 'no gluten, no dairy, no meat, no sugar'; Joe didn't get her message to bring wine home; they both drop clangers about Pina's childlessness.

Even in the face of Pina's Spanish charm and Hawk's relentless bonhomie, awkwardness abounds.

Some of this is very funny, but there are bittersweet notes too. Hawk and Pina have only been together for a year, following his wife's death. Angela and Joe's joyless relationship used to be full of music and fun.

When it emerges that the rowdy sex upstairs is basically an orgy with two others and sometimes more, Joe and Angela become intrigued by the notion that they might take part.

Here, the script deals neatly with the unavoidable fact that Rogen and Wilde are not, let's say, an obvious physical match (her former partner in real life was Harry Styles, for heaven's sake). 

'Me too?' Joe asks, disbelievingly, when a group session is suggested. It's a gloriously mischievous and subversive reference to the hashtag movement of the same name.

So, what next? Pina turns out to be a professional sexologist who isn't sure that Joe and Angela are ready for collective hanky-panky. Maybe they could just swap partners for the evening?

All of which makes The Invite sound like a glib modernised version of the 1969 farce Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. But it is more profound than that, offering a genuinely insightful peek into the human, and marital, condition.

And it represents another triumph in Wilde's short but impressive directing career, which began in 2019 with the acclaimed coming-of-age comedy Booksmart.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (15, 100 mins)

Rating: Four stars 

Verdict: Loopy but fun

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is another comedy, which borrows from the 1985 time-travel classic Back To The Future but is twice as nuts.

It has nothing to do with Nirvana the actual band, indeed precious little to do with music. 

Co-writers Matt Johnson (also the director) and Jay McCarrol play… Matt and Jay, amiable middle-aged nitwits whose arrested development falls into the tradition of Laurel and Hardy, or Abbott and Costello.

Although we never hear their band perform, they crave a gig at a well-known Toronto venue called the Rivoli, to which end they plot an outrageous publicity stunt, sky-diving off the city's enormous CN Tower, one of the world's tallest buildings.

Then, via a series of mad misadventures, they find themselves propelled back through time to 2008, where alarmingly they encounter their younger selves.

To depict this, Johnson uses footage from their own web series of 18 years ago – which, though I confess I'd never heard of it until this week, by all accounts had a cult following.

This feature-length follow-up deserves a wider audience. It is certainly open to a charge of self-indulgence, but is engagingly silly enough to get away with it.

All films are in cinemas now except for Enola Holmes (below), which is on Netflix.

Also showing 

The Minions as silent movie stars? It's a laugh-out-loud riot

Cinemas are awash with sequels and spin-offs, which is normally worthy of an eye roll, but occasionally a film comes along that's worth celebrating. Minions & Monsters,(U, 90 mins, four out of five stars) the seventh instalment in the Despicable Me franchise, is a delight.

For the uninitiated, the Minions are little yellow pill-shaped creatures which, speaking a hybrid of French, Spanish, Italian and gobbledygook, travel around the Earth and through time seeking evil overlords to serve.

Here, they end up in the silent era of Hollywood, where they become movie stars.

Film buffs might quibble at the historical accuracy of references to Tinseltown's golden age. But it's done with terrific verve and wit, and there are some very funny scenes in which the Minions lose their lustre once talkies come along.

Much of this will fly over the heads of pint-sized audiences, but there's more than enough to keep them happy while their parents and grandparents are chuckling away.

A tip-top voice cast includes Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg and Allison Janney, with Star Wars director George Lucas voicing himself in a laugh-out-loud cameo.

If you prefer your entertainment at home, the Netflix film Enola Holmes 3 (12, 105 mins, three out of five stars) has its virtues. 

It is written by Jack Thorne and . This time they join forces to more frivolous effect.

In the latest adventure , Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) finds herself in Malta where she is due to marry dishy-but-drippy Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge).

The second thoughts she's having are soon compounded by the abduction of Sherlock (Henry Cavill), followed by that of Tewkesbury's mother (Hattie Morahan).

 What dastardly business is afoot?

A convoluted plot eventually reveals all, and as long as you don't mind Brown playing a young Victorian like a modern-day instagrammer, it's modest fun.