Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups: "The Invite," "El Tren Fantasma," More

What I've Been Into...

"The Invite" (2026). This locked-room comedy is one of the best-written, best-acted and most entertaining films I've seen in a long time.

Olivia Wilde (who directed) and Seth Rogen play Angela and Joe, a couple who's marriage has dulled into mutual antagonism. Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, meanwhile, are Pína and Hawk, the much more-interested, far-more-in-love couple that lives upstairs.

The movie launches almost immediately into fireworks. Angela has invited the neighbors down for dinner, and Joe's not on board with the idea at all. But it's too late when there's a knock on the door. Small talk and cordiality is out the window. Pína and Hawk have heard Angela and Joe arguing, and it's clear that Joe doesn't want them there. Things get real right quick.

Watching this foursome awkwardly interact is uncomfortable, yet also freeing. Their honesty and rudeness is freeing and it's impossible to look away. How are any of them going to get out of this with any dignity intact, and will Angela and Joe take Pína and Hawk up on their offer to liven things up by changing partners (and we're not talking about square dancing)?

Much like the equally hilarious "The Drama" from earlier this year, "The Invite" has a lot to say about humans, relationships and the pain and discomfort we put one another through simply by being ridiculous.

Chris Watson - El Tren Fantasma. This is a trippy, hypnotic audio journey made for headphones. Watson blends field recordings of trains, railway stations, cityscape and nature (lots of birds and insects) to evoke a ghost train journey from Los Mochis to Veracruz, Mexico.

The results will make you pay attention to the sounds that makeup our everyday surroundings.

Named by The Guardian as "One of the Albums You Should Hear Before You Die." Glad I did.

Available via BandCamp.

Reads:

The Neglected Books Page reminds us of John P. Marquand's "So Little Time."

It’s a little hard to believe now how important "So Little Time" was to John P. Marquand’s career. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1937 epistolary novel, "The Late George Apley," and his two subsequent mainstream novels, "Wickford Point" (1939) and "H. M. Pulham, Esq." (1942), had received enthusiastic reviews and bestseller list sales numbers. His five Mr. Moto detective novels had not only sold well but spawned eight film adaptations in the space of three years.

When "So Little Time" came out in the late summer of 1943, however, Marquand’s critical and commercial reputation skyrocketed. By the end of September, Little, Brown proclaimed that they’d sold over 400,000 copies — and that didn’t include the likely more than 200,000 copies sold as September’s feature book of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Marquand biographer Millicent Bell reports that the book earned the author over $90,000 in 1943. To put those numbers in terms relative to 2026, it was as if Marquand had made $1.7 million from selling over 1.4 million copies today.

The novel received feature billing in every book section in the country (and this was a time when every newspaper had at least a weekly book review section). A. C. Spectorsky, book editor of the Chicago Sun and one of the most influential critics of his time, declared, “Let’s face it, John P. Marquand is the major American novelist writing today” — a line Little, Brown happily trumpeted from their ads. One of the few skeptics among the first wave of reviewers, Philip Toynbee wondered in response, “Is it really true that Marquand is superior to Hemingway, Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Steinbeck, Mary McCarthy, Farrell, Carson, McCullers…?” — and ironically, all the names in Toynbee’s list are far better recognized today than Marquand.