She's the He! (2026). A very indie high school comedy with an all-queer cast about two teen boys who, in order to show everyone that they're not gay for each other, hatch a plan to pretend to be trans girls. (No, this does not make any more sense in the movie than it does in that description.) Then one of them realizes she might actually be trans.
This has a lot of heart and is very funny, with a lot of genuinely laugh out loud moments. The two leads are great, with Misha Osherovich providing the heart and soul and Nico Carney providing the antics.
There were parts where the pacing didn't quite work for me, like the compressed arc of "I might be trans" to "Continuing to live as a boy might kill me" in the space of a few days. The entire football team trying to break into the girls' locker room felt a bit too real, tonally, compared to the rest of the film. The movie this reminded me of the most was Bottoms, but the climactic battle there felt a lot sillier and less realistically threatening. However, for a tiny indie film like this with its heart clearly in the right place, I'm willing to forgive a lot.
On a side note, the nonbinary love interest is SMOKING hot and has chemistry with literally everyone. (Maybe too much chemistry, as at first I misjudged whose love interest they were.) And the two leads have absolutely incredible eyelashes.
Overall a great time. There's some conflict with the trans girl's mom, if you're sensitive to that, but otherwise a hearty recommendation from me.
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The Invite (2026). Bickering couple Angela (Olivia Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen) have the neighbors Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penelope Cruz) over for dinner, and things get complicated.
This is getting a ton of great reviews, with lots of people saying things like "thank god, finally they're making adult comedies again." It does have a lot of things you're supposed to laugh at, mostly Joe being rude or Angela being an anxiety-ridden control freak. Later on we find out that Hawk and Pina are poly, which Joe and Angela are shocked and pleasantly scandalized by, and I guess that's supposed to be funny, too. (Meanwhile I was like omg, they said the word "compersion" in a movie. Multiple times!)
I was mildly entertained through all of this, not sure where on earth we were going, and then things got serious in the final fifteen minutes, which I did not expect at all. After apparently existing in a comedy universe for most of the film, suddenly we
( thematic spoilers ) Honestly this worked pretty well, as a tonal turnabout. Is this how adult comedies usually work? I guess I haven't really seen many of them. Certainly it feels like a very A24 approach to the genre.
It's a tightly written script and Wilde directs very confidently. The performances are all very good, as you would expect. It's functionally a bottle episode, as the entire movie takes place in the one apartment outside of the opening scene, and I believe the four main cast members are the only ones with lines. More and more I've come to appreciate that kind of restraint in storytelling. The set design of the apartment is great and is part of the story, as it's Angela's main life obsession. Everything is seafoam green, even her shirt.
I didn't hate the experience of watching this movie, and overall I think the execution is very good. It just feels like it ultimately was not my kind of thing. However, if it sounds like your kind of thing, I definitely recommend it.
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