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!

The three tween best friends at the center of Good Boys refer to themselves as “The Bean Bag Club” (an endearingly literal-minded nickname based on their affection for bean bags) so many times, I began to wonder if that was an early title of the film. If so, I’m glad they went with the slightly generic alternative. It fits. The most charming thing about Good Boys is that the three buds are, indeed, good boys. Their parents only exist in the margins of the film, but in some ways, they are front and center, having instilled their sons with sound liberal values. The boys hate drugs (“they destroy lives and communities” they recite solemnly), they respect authority (almost to a fault), and, most significantly, they consider sexual consent a sacred trust.

This is particularly important because our hero Max (Jacob Tremblay) is suddenly interested in girls—one girl, in fact, a pretty skater named Brixlee (Millie Davis), whom Max stares at, in slack-jawed admiration, whenever he encounters her. Because this is the beginning of sixth grade, they negotiate through intermediaries: If Max admits he has a crush on Brixlee, her best friend reports, she might admit that she has a crush back. (This detail tugged at a long dormant memory of my own sixth grade deal making.) And now, looming in the near future: a basement kissing party that both Max and his buds, Lucas (Keith L. Williams) and Thor (Brady Noon), and Brixlee have been invited to. They have to learn how to kiss—and fast.

Good Boys is about that particular developmental time when a trio of best friends might be at completely different levels of maturity. One brags that he has “six pubes.” They all think beer tastes gross. Lucas is extremely attached to his parents, cheerfully telling them every (sometimes outrageously sordid) detail of his young life. They wisely talk about things they only partially understand (“a nymphomaniac is someone who has sex on both land and sea,” Max reports). But only Max has truly become sex obsessed.

Because this film is brought to you by the Seth Rogen-led production team that created Superbad, Sausage Party, and Neighbors, you know there’s going to be plenty of raunchiness and drug-related mischief ahead. One of the film’s ongoing gags is that Thor’s parents have a very, um, robust sex life, so the kids are constantly misidentifying sex toys for things they are not. Most amusingly, they mistake a sex doll for a CPR doll. They decide to practice kissing on the doll, and this is the first time we encounter their consent evangelism. “Wait! You didn’t ask for consent!” Lucas says earnestly, as Max leans in for a pucker.

Good Boys is the kind of film where the “plot” is merely an excuse to put the characters in increasingly absurd situations, but even by those loose standards, it’s a bit flimsy. Basically, the boys use a drone belonging to Max’s father (Will Forte) to spy on a teenage girl (Molly Gordon) whom they think must be a kissing expert; the drone crashes; she ends up with the drone and they somehow manage to steal the molly she and her friend (Midori Francis) were planning on taking for a wild night out on the town. An elaborate cat and mouse game ensues.

Although Good Boys largely plays like a tween version of Superbad—with an explicit nod to Stranger Things and even a touch of Stand By Me—it’s clear that writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (who also directs) are fans of the great old Tom Cruise vehicle, Risky Business, too. Just as Cruise’s Joel Goodson was racing against the clock to retrieve his parents’ precious crystal egg, Max is determined to get the drone back before his father knows he took it.

There are lots of laughs in Good Boys and the trio of young actors are top notch. Tremblay, with his “sad eyes” and tossled hair, has already established himself as a pint-sized movie star, but Williams is particularly funny as the sweetest of them all, a nervous tween narc (“we have drugs!” he blurts out to an indifferent cop), who has the misfortune of looking like an 18 year old. Noon nails the “theater kid who desperately wants to be cool” vibe.

As outrageous as the jokes and scenarios get—a drug deal at a frat house, a death defying sprint across a crowded highway—the film never loses sight of the fact that these are really nice boys. (On top of all the sex jokes, there’s a family-friendly joke about the boys battling the scourge of child-proof drug caps.) And, as in Superbad, there’s a poignance here as well. Childhood friendships are wonderful, magical—and, yes, generally ephemeral. Good Boys knows this. It adds a slightly bittersweet undertone to all the mayhem. For all its stupid fun, Good Boys is pretty darn smart.

You’ve got to hand it to Seth Rogen. Several years ago, he caught some flak for appearing with Katherine Heigl in the rom-com Knocked Up. The film became something of a poster child for the “schlubby guy is paired with beautiful woman” trope. So now, years later, he’s doubling down by starring in a romantic comedy with none other than Charlize Freaking Theron.

But here’s the thing, the pairing works, partly because they lean into the unlikeliness of the romance, partly because the film is feminist in many other ways, and partly because Theron and Rogen have charm and chemistry to burn.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an old-fashioned rom-com like this, albeit one that makes several nods to current events. Rogen plays Fred Flarsky, a journalist with perhaps too much personal integrity for his own good. When a Rupert Murdoch-like figure buys the indie newspaper Fred works for, he quits. He drowns his sorrows in the company of his best friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a successful tech entrepreneur, who takes him to a swanky party. There, Fred locks eyes with Secretary of State Charlotte Field (Theron). Turns out, she babysat for him when he was a kid—and he’s been crushing on her since puberty. He’s shocked when she actually remembers him.

Charlotte is about to launch a presidential bid and, while voters find her polished and competent, they don’t find her particularly funny or relatable. (They also disapprove of her hella awkward wave.) Charlotte decides to bring on Fred to help humanize her speeches, much to the mortification of her buttoned-down personal assistant, Maggie (June Diane Raphael), who disapproves of Fred’s slovenly, stoner ways.

The supporting cast might be the secret MVPs of this film, and Raphael is a particular revelation as Maggie, who hates Fred and isn’t shy about letting him know it. (With their quick, cutting banter, the two of them almost have their own mini rom-com happening on the sidelines.) Jackson, who was so charming in Ingrid Goes West, again proves that he’s a sneaky scene stealer. His Lance is great ally for his pal Fred who also teaches Fred a great lesson about the limits of his own self-righteousness. Bob Odenkirk as the bumbling President Chambers, a former TV actor who wants to make the transition from TV to the White House to film, is predictably funny, as is Alexander Skarsgård as the dreamy Canadian Prime Minister who is actually a bit of a twit.

The film’s politics are not quite as sophisticated as I might’ve hoped (it has nothing on the gold standard political love story, The American President), but they get the job done. Basically, Charlotte has to keep compromising her values to win President Chambers’ endorsement. She argues for the ends (her election) justifying the means. Fred is all about never compromising. It echoes a debate we’ve seen over and over again on Twitter and elsewhere.

One of my favorite ongoing gags involves periodic cut-ins to a Fox News-like morning show, where a female anchor, a constipated smile frozen on her face, enables the sexist banter of her male cohosts. (This bit resolves in a satisfying way.) Another great bit has Charlotte negotiating a hostage release from the Situation Room, while high on molly.

But as I said, none of this would work if Rogen and Theron weren’t so winning and if Fred and Charlotte didn’t seem to genuinely like each other so much. They very accurately recreate the giddy early stages of a relationship where all you want to do is hang out, have sex, and vibe off each other. Sure, Charlotte might be a Duchess Catherine type and Fred might be a Danny DeVito (to use one of the film’s analogies). But when it works, it works.