The Invite starts with an Oscar Wilde quote that perfectly sets up what we’re about to see: “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”

Enter Angela (Olivia Wilde, who also directed) and Joe (Seth Rogen). They were in love once, allegedly, when he was an aspiring indie musician (his band had one minor hit and dissolved) and she was an art student. (She no longer practices her art.) They used to have a lot of sex, too, Angela claims. Great sex. But now they are living lives of quiet disappointment, if not quite desperation.

They no longer have sex. They have a 12-year-old daughter they love—she is the glue that keeps them together. He retreats to his home “studio,” to smoke pot and zone out. She redecorates the house—searching for creative fulfillment anywhere she can get it. The nice apartment they live in? It was the house Joe grew up in; he doesn’t even own it—a source of constant shame for him.

It is Angela who invites the mysterious and glamorous upstairs neighbors for dinner. When Joe comes home from work—he teaches music at a small college in the shadow of Berkley—he’s tired from biking up San Francisco’s hills. His back hurts, as usual. But Angela has been fussing. She has put out a spread—cheese, ham, bread, flowers—and is making a soufflé.

“Are we expecting company?” he says, mortified.

Yes, she says, the neighbors. I told you yesterday they were coming.

No you didn’t, Joe rebuts.

You never listen to me, Angela replies.

There’s something else about these neighbors—they have absurdly loud sex in the middle of the night. Joe and Angela always talk about them—like all long-married couples, some of their best conversations involve speculating about the private lives of others. Joe thinks their noises are selfish at best and performative at worst.

So Joe is pissed. Not just because the boisterous sex keeps him up at night but because he thinks the male in the relationship is creepy and makes too much eye contact in the elevator. If they’re coming, Joe says, I’m going to confront them about the loud sex.

They’re arguing over this when Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz, in a blonde wig) arrive.

Piña, of course, is gorgeous, preternaturally confident, sexy—she is played by Penélope Cruz, after all. Hawk (his ridiculous name is a source of cruel amusement for Joe) is, as advertised, a bit smarmy. The couple believes in radical honesty. We heard you arguing, they say. Angela tries to demur, “No…we….”

We were having a fight, Joe admits, adding, things are a bit contentious between us right now.

“We like contentious,” Hawk says.

“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” Joe cracks.

The guests take in the decorating that Angela has done—complimenting her taste and the “energy” she created. Joe rolls his eyes—he hates this kind of New Age bullshit—but Angela is overwhelmed. She starts to cry. “I was going for energy,” she sniffs. It’s clear that Angela wants to be seen—by Joe, of course, but by anyone. This is why the couples’ approbations overcome her like that.

The dinner party commences—well, to an extent. Angela has burned the soufflé. Piña is a gluten-free, dairy-free vegetarian, so she can’t eat the Jamón or the cheese Angela has put out (she picks at olives instead). And they are forced to break into their special occasion wine—and later tequila—to have something to drink.

Meanwhile, Joe keeps threatening to bring up the loud sex. In one hilarious scene, he tries to mention it several times but Angela keeps shoving the flan that Piña has made into his mouth to shut him up.

Wilde directs this inflamed dinner party with a swirling camera as though we are witnessing a mating/domination ritual. And the film’s string score combines playful jauntiness with elements of caustic and disruptive staccato. The film is extremely funny—at one point, Angela shows Hawk the three paint shades she is considering for the bedroom and it’s clear they’re all exactly the same—a white-ish gray. Hawk, pretentiously, suggests that one color feels like a walk on the beach, one feels like a hot morning on a Southern veranda, and one feels like a date with a stranger in Copenhagen. Angela’s mouth drops open. He gets it. “Joe thinks they’re all the same,” she says, shaking her head.

Things are relatively harmonious for a while, but we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yes, the verbal sparring and tension recalls Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but this is as much a sex comedy as it an exploration of power dynamics among the couples.

Piña and Hawk, who occasionally converse in Spanish, who have a natural (or performative) physical intimacy, and who sometimes regard Joe and Angela like they are amusing children, clearly have the upper hand. But the power dynamics will shift throughout the night. And maybe, just maybe, Piña and Hawk aren’t as perfectly content as they seem.

Olivia Wilde, working off a script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, has hit a home run here. The film is uproariously funny and sexy but more than a little sad, too. Is it too late for Joe and Angela to find their way back to each other? Or is their marriage the very thing that has doomed their love?

The cast is note perfect, with Rogen evoking cranky, funny, neurotics like Albert Brooks and Woody Allen and Wilde—emotional, frazzled, unaware of her own beauty— evoking Diane Keaton. Cruz has the sexual confidence of Anne Bancroft in The Graduate and the self-satisfied Norton is reminiscent of Alan Alda in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Yes, there’s a reason I’m recalling stars of yore. The Invite feels like a throwback to the grown up films of the ’70s and early ’80s. What an absolute pleasure. Grownups are back, baby!

If Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana were overachieving high school students who never got high—a stretch, I admit—they’d look something like the ride or die besties in Olivia Wilde’s endearing and hilarious Booksmart. It’s the last day of school and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are performing their usual ritual. Amy roles up in her mom’s “Vulva,” they do a spontaneous dance on the sidewalks, and pile on an ever-escalating series of mutual hosannas. Molly is confident in their future—she’s going to Yale; Amy is doing volunteer work in Botswana before heading to Columbia. They don’t really have friends outside of each other, although their classmates tolerate and perhaps harbor some mild curiosity about them. Even the high school principal (Jason Sudeikis) rolls his eyes when they show up in his office (Molly, class president, wants to discuss the school budget). Molly is the kind of person who, whipping out a marker and shaking her head with irritation, corrects the grammar of the bathroom graffiti. But it’s all been worth it—because they’ve made it, and their hard-partying classmates most definitely haven’t.

Except not so much. Molly’s mind is completely blown when she discovers that all the other kids in her orbit are successful, too. The sexy skater girl Triple A (Molly Gordon) is also going to Yale. Her floppy haired cohort (Nico Hiraga), who favors backwards overalls and no shirt, is going to Stanford. Molly’s ne’er do well class vice president Nick (Mason Gooding)—the popular jock—is going to Georgetown. Another classmate (Eduardo Franco) is skipping college altogether to begin a job coding at Google. And so on.

Molly suddenly realizes that she and Amy could’ve had their cake and eat it, too, so to speak. She’s determined to make up for lost time—lots of it—with one final hard-partying night.

The premise of two bookish pals looking for the party of a lifetime has been done many times before—from John Hughes films to Superbad—but it’s a reliable genre that Wilde negotiates with verve. My favorite thing about the film is the specificity of—and generosity toward—its characters. Every character has a recognizable interior life, from the pint-sized, lounge lizard theater impresario (Noah Galvin)—he’s basically a gay 50 year old man in the body of a teenager—to the braggadocious yet deeply insecure rich kid (Skyler Gisondo), a virgin whose license plate nonetheless reads “Fuk Boi.” A young teacher (Jessica Williams) hovers outside the raging party and says, mostly to herself, “It would be weird if I went inside, right?” And then there’s the film’s recurring joke, a flower child rich girl (note-perfect Billie Lourd) who is so all-seeing and ubiquitous, she seems to defy the laws of physics.

As mentioned, Booksmart has echoes of past films, including a touch of Greta Gerwig’s early-aughts-set Lady Bird, but it’s clearly rooted in the here and now. Amy happens to be a lesbian, a fact that isn’t a revelation but just a known thing. When she wonders if a female classmate she’s crushing on is also gay, Molly points out that the girl wore a polo shirt to prom. “That’s gender performativeness,” corrects Amy, noting that isn’t the same thing as sexuality. This is the way kids actually talk today. Later, Amy and Molly have a confrontation at the party. The dialogue cuts out and all we see is their lips moving and the glow of cameras as their classmates document all the drama on their phones.

The film is peppered with jokes—some highly clever, some merely raunchy, as the genre demands—but it also has a beating heart. We care about Molly and Amy not because the film is sentimental, but because their friendship and connection rings so true. I love when I’m surprised by my own tears at the end of a film, as was the case here. Consistently funny as it is, Booksmart earns its emotional payoff.