What to watch this weekend: Ferrell and Witherspoon cordially invite you to the return of the star-led comedy | Canada Voices

You’re Cordially Invited (Prime Video)

What was the last pure, original star-led comedy – one that didn’t involve superheroes, ghostbusters, Barbie, or wasn’t filtered through the lens of an action flick – to open in theatres? Maybe last year’s remake of Mean Girls, although that was a musical. It just might be the 2023 movie Strays, and I’m not sure that even counts because it focused on talking dogs voiced by the likes of Jamie Foxx and Will Ferrell. Either way, it’s safe to say that the real heyday of Ferrell and company, the era when Judd Apatow ruled the multiplex, is over. Which makes the arrival of a new Ferrell film something of [puts on my best Ron Burgundy voice] a pretty big deal – even if it is going straight to streaming.

You’re Cordially Invited pairs Ferrell alongside Reese Witherspoon – another big-screen comedy star who has lately made a comfortable home for herself on the small screen – as two rivals fighting over a destination-wedding site. Ferrell is a suburban widower who has booked an isolated island hotel as the site for the nuptials of his only child (Geraldine Viswanathan). Witherspoon is the high-powered Hollywood executive planning the wedding of her younger sister (Meredith Hagner) at that same location, the result of some accidental double booking. Now, the two will fight it out, with the hijinks stretching from name-calling to alligator-wrangling. It is all very silly in the typical late-career Ferrell mode – this isn’t high-brow absurdity à la Step Brothers, but more an enjoyable-enough lark in the vein of Get Hard and The House (both of which are not as bad as their reputations suggest). Witherspoon, in typical Type A mode, is game, too, as Ferrell’s rival, and maybe more.

But what differentiates the whole affair from other, more forgettable straight-to-streaming comedies that have attempted to fill the big-screen void – such as Netflix’s A Family Affair or Old Dads – is the highly professional sheen of director Nicholas Stoller. Aside from Apatow, there is no other Hollywood filmmaker more responsible for that particular comedy boom of the mid-aughts than Stoller, whose comedy canon of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors, The Five-Year Engagement and Bros (perhaps the last big-studio comedy of that particular era) is untouchable. Even Get Him to the Greek holds up, even if its cast (Russell Brand, P. Diddy) have not aged so well. You’re Cordially Invited isn’t going to enjoy as long a legacy as any of Ferrell’s earlier projects – I’ve already forgotten his character’s name – but it demands more of your attention, and in turn delivers more amusement, than just about any other comedy in recent memory, big screen or otherwise.

Gladiator II (Paramount+)

Are you not entertained? Well, kinda. While watching Ridley Scott’s decades-later sequel a few months ago, I couldn’t help but wonder just where the filmmaker had gone wrong on his way back to the forum. Paul Mescal, wonderful actor that he can be, just doesn’t have the gravitas of Russell Crowe. The visual effects, especially when the amateur gladiators fight off a horde of blood-thirsty monkeys, were hideous. And where exactly did Scott get the idea that great white sharks were unleashed inside the Colosseum? I dunno, maybe I was just thinking too hard for a film that, well, unleashes sharks inside a flooded Colosseum. At least Denzel Washington is perfect as an ancient Rome string-puller, having so much fun playing the bad guy that he seems to be starring in his own little separate movie. And Pedro Pascal is as naturally compelling as ever in his somewhat thankless role as a general with a conscience. Perhaps the package all comes weighted with less expectations when viewed on the small screen. You be the judge: Thumbs up, or down?

Queer (MUBI)

As fun as it was to watch Daniel Craig sip martinis and slug henchmen in his 007 outings, it’s been far more entertaining to follow the actor as he tries his very best to outrun James Bond’s shadow in all his subsequent features. From his southern-fried gumshoe in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films to this, Luca Guadagnino’s second-best film of 2024, Craig’s mission to re-establish his versatility is not only admirable, it’s highly effective. Which is why the star is the best reason to check out this too-leisurely paced, frequently wobbly adaptation of a 1985 William S. Burroughs novella, in which Craig plays an American expat who slums around Mexico City circa 1950, looking for something to stir his soul.

Challengers (Prime Video)

Hey, speaking of Guadagnino, why not check out the director’s best film of 2024, especially now that the Academy Awards bizarrely decided that it wasn’t worth a single Oscar nomination? Bouncing back and forth in time like the most high intensity of tennis matches, the film opens with the sport’s all-star sex symbol Art (Mike Faist) trying to figure out his next move after falling into a losing-streak rut. At the behest of his demanding wife-slash-coach Tashi (Zendaya), Art signs up for a low-stakes tournament in New Rochelle, N.Y., where he just so happens to come up against the down-on-his-luck maverick Patrick (Josh O’Connor). As increasingly complicated flashbacks reveal, though, Art and Patrick were once best friends – the pair so closely bonded that they nearly scored a threesome back in their junior doubles days with Tashi, when she, too, was a young tennis phenom. With the story focused almost exclusively on just Tashi, Art and Patrick, Guadagnino creates a fevered, exhilarating epic that makes the smallest of personal dramas feel magnificently epic. As the film pushes through the paces of Art and Patrick’s New Rochelle match – all sweat and grunts, gradual victories and temporary defeats – Guadagnino delicately and precisely peels back layer after layer of their relationship with one another, and Tashi.

Saturday Night (Crave)

In James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s 2002 book Live from New York, a massive and enormously entertaining oral history of Saturday Night Live, the journalists capture a skeleton-key quote from SNL mastermind Lorne Michaels that unlocks the show’s appeal upon launch: “So much of what Saturday Night Live wanted to be, or I wanted it to be when it began, was cool. Which was something television wasn’t, except in a retro way.” Michaels succeeded on that front, even if the ensuing decades of SNL highs also delivered all kinds of “Saturday Night Dead” lows.

But I couldn’t keep Michaels’s soundbite out of my head while watching Jason Reitman’s new film Saturday Night, a faux “real-time” chronicle of the hectic 90 minutes leading up to SNL’s debut in 1975. This is a movie that badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides. But for all the die-hard SNL fans out there, it might still be worth watching thanks to a handful of almost supernaturally good impersonations: Cory Michael Smith as Chase, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin and Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris.