Drinking Buddies, review - Telegraph Forget the scorched-earth binges of Withnail and I and The Hangover. Drinking Buddies, the new film from Joe Swanberg, gives us alcohol in moderation. Swanberg's light, loose comic drama mostly takes place between beers one and five: that golden spell when life suddenly seems to become easily navigable, and even the cloudiest romantic predicaments take on a sky-blue clarity. Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) are warm, flirtatious co-workers at a boutiquey brewery in Boston, who often chat over a glass or two of their produce in the evenings, or at lunch. They'd make a perfect couple, you think, except both are already spoken for: Kate by Chris (Ron Livingston), a buttoned-down nice guy, and Luke by Jill (Anna Kendrick), a collected young woman with her eyes on the long term. In other words, it's complicated. But alcohol can whip up a mirage of easy answers, and so during a boozy double-date weekend at the beach, Kate and Luke start to suspect that they may be soulmates, while Chris and Jill realise that they may have more in common than partners who work at a brewery. Drink is a social lubricant, but on film it's seldom quite this slippery, and Swanberg makes sure your premonitions of rom-commish plot turns are continually wrong-footed. A sequence in which Luke helps Kate move house, for example, slumps amusingly from romantic hijinks into grim, sofa-lugging drudgery. Swanberg comes from the ultra-low-fi mumblecore movement, and works in an improvisational style that doesn't suit every member of his mixed-ability cast. But Wilde, freed from the pin-up constraints of her roles in pictures such as Cowboys & Aliens and Tron: Legacy, is a minor revelation, while Kendrick is an entirely expected delight. This is thoughtful film-making with a keen sense of humour, and we can all drink to that.