Prime Time: You're Cordially Invited (2025)

I'm not a big fan of writer-director Nicholas Stoller, but I always tend to forget this when I prepare to watch another movie from him. I'm not sure that I even noticed his name here while I was being distracted by the fact that it was a comedy pairing up Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon in the lead roles. The fact that the supporting cast included Geraldine Viswanathan, Meredith Hagner, Jimmy Tatro, and Jack McBrayer also seemed to bode well.

It's a simple premise, ripe with comedy potential. Ferrell plays Jim, a doting dad who is hoping to oversee a dream wedding day for his daughter, Jenni (Viswanathan), and her partner, Oliver (Stony Blyden). Witherspoon is a successful TV producer who wants to oversee a dream wedding for her sister, Neve (Hagner), and her partner, Dixon (Tatro). Their worlds collide when the island resort they have hired for the wedding celebrations has accidentally booked them both in for the same weekend . . . when they only have the ability to host one wedding at a time. And so begins a disappointingly unfunny series of spats, with both of our leads trying to shoulder one another out of the way as they make the most of the big wedding weekend.

I don't want to spend too much time going over how much this gets wrong, especially when I am already depressed by the memory of the movie and the memory of how I fooled myself into thinking that it wasn't TOO bad. It's bad, very bad, and it's a waste of the talent of pretty much everyone involved.

Stoller directs as if he's just sleepwalking through the whole thing, but maybe his own script had already knocked him unconscious. The plot beats feel tired and unsurprising, the running gags (including use of a very famous song) don't land well, and there's also an annoying lack of bite. Both of our leads swither between rolling up their sleeves to fight one another and then just using each other as a shoulder to cry on. And as for the very last scenes . . . I won't spoil anything, but I cannot think of a Ferrell comedy that has been so wildly misjudged in trying to make everything and everyone wrapped up in a neat bow.

There were times when I laughed at this, and those laughs were all caused by Ferrell blurting out some inappropriate insults. He's at his funniest in those moments, and you want Ferrell to be funny in a comedy movie that gives him one of the lead roles, but they are very few and far between. Witherspoon does the kind of uptight thing she has been doing for decades, although she is allowed to soften slightly here in a way that allows you to eventually warm to her character a bit more. Viswanathan and Blyde are fun, as are Hagner and Tatro, and there are moments that try to make the most of McBrayer, Leanne Morgan, Rory Scovel, Keyla Monterroso Mejia, and Celia Weston, as well as a few others. Everyone is far too hampered by the weak material though, sadly, and even a potential set-piece involving our leads in the same room as an alligator fails to prompt even a mild chuckle.

It's really hard to argue against people who see streaming movies as inferior alternatives to cinema releases when Amazon put their money into something like this. This has the stars, it has familiar songs on the soundtrack, and it at least has a runtime of under two hours (clocking in at about 109 minutes). It doesn't have any soul or artistry to it though. More importantly, it doesn't have many laughs.

3/10

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Joshua AKA The Devil's Child (2007)

A film with an alternative title that is as useful as it is incorrect, Joshua is a “bad seed” movie that sadly never settles on just the right tone it wants to have. It’s a creepy slow burn on the way to an unsettling final scene, but it’s neither subtle nor ridiculous enough to be as impressive or entertaining as it could be.

Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga are Brad and Abby, the parents of a newborn baby girl. The newborn already has an older brother, Joshua (Jacob Kogan), and it is established early on that the family unit isn’t as cosy and happy as some. Abby is suffering, the baby won’t stop crying, and Joshua gets weirder and weirder, and potentially more dangerous to those around him.

Directed by George Ratliff, who also co-wrote the screenplay with David Gilbert, this is a silly film, but only when you stop to think of the many ways in which the main characters could resolve their situation. To the credit of the film-makers, the pacing of the third act, as things hurtle towards a worthwhile “punchline”, helps you to overlook the many plot holes.

The cast also help, of course. I will watch Rockwell in anything, and he does well in his role here, and Farmiga is easily just as good a performer as he is (although she hasn’t had as many plum roles). Both are playing people under different pressures, and a lot of that is applied by young Joshua, even though they don’t always realise it. In that vital role, Kogan is pretty good, although his entire persona is defined as awkward and/or creepy. Michael McKean has a small, but welcome, role, playing the boss of Brad, and only really caring about anything that affects the profit margin of the business. And you have some decent moneys for both Celia Weston, as the gran, and Dallas Roberts, as the uncle Joshua enjoys spending time with.

It would be fair to warn new parents away from this, considering the unrelenting atmosphere of misery and stress that permeates the entire runtime, because the scenes that play out more realistically will resonate strongly with anyone who has, for example, struggled to get a baby to feed or sleep. Most people, hopefully, won’t have a little psychopath making their lives worse, but parenting can be hard enough, at times, when you cannot find an immediate solution to keep a child content.

That aside, Joshua should have been deeply unsettling by and disturbing, or simply just bonkers and fun. Sadly, it is just disappointingly average.

5/10

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