Kyle Smith

Though I Want Your Sex is shamelessly silly and lacks the real-world concerns that made The Invite one of the best movies of the year so far, it does offer some wry insights.

The banality-clogged script plays like teen TV melodrama minus the teens. It wallows in angst and stress but has no psychological depth, sticking to bromides like “You’re special” and “Be yourself.” Being somber is a lot easier than being serious.

War-torn romances are nothing new, but in Mr. Aris’s story it’s not the shattered buildings that constitute the real wreckage.

Thanks in major part to the lush, romantic, strings-laden musical score by Pino Donaggio (also a favorite of Mr. De Palma) and the madly expressive carnival swirl of spooky images captured by cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, the movie has much the same mystique as the more abstract works of David Lynch. When you burrow this deep into the subconscious, logic is beside the point.

For the most part, the movie is a shapeless exercise in enjoyable lunacy, so a lot depends on whether the final act brings everything together in a satisfying way. It does so incompletely.

Though occasionally less than ideally written and acted, “The Odyssey,” as a feast of image and sound, is an exceptional cinematic experience. Especially evocative are the loamy cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema and the musical score, built around period instruments, which marks yet another transcendent achievement by Ludwig Göransson (who won one of his three Oscars for “Oppenheimer”). Odysseus is obsessed with honor, and Mr. Nolan has likewise done everything in his considerable power to pay worthy cinematic tribute to one of our foundational texts.

Despite some thin spots, “Gail Daughtry” is a comic highlight of the summer.

Surely literature is a path to discovering other sensibilities, other universes; “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” by contrast, is about people essentially saying, “This book is meaningful because it reminds me of my life.”

As raucous as The Invite gets when it’s in go-for-broke comedy mode, it’s just as powerful in its dramatic stages. Movies rarely venture so far into the hearts of ordinary people trying to do their best but suspecting they have made a great many irreparable mistakes.

Kara is so blasé about everything that she might as well be called Don’t Kara. Your evaluation of the movie will depend almost entirely on whether you find her enchantingly messed up. Maybe she comes across that way in some other universe.