Category: Comedy

  • Heathers (1988)

    If you can handle teen suicide as suitable subject matter for the blackest of black comedies, here’s a movie for you. As the flip (and dark) side of John Hughes‘ ‘80s-era youth-centric flicks, Heathers draws blood knifing through the unforgiving social hierarchies of high school. It imagines how tensions between popular kids and pariahs can…

  • Calvary (2014)

    Brendan Gleeson exudes world-weariness as if it were a pheromone. Craggy and thick-bodied, his eyes hinting at untold sadness, he routinely makes a strong presence in most of his movies, no matter how modest the part. And he is at his dour best in Calvary, a tough, theologically minded film in which Gleeson portrays a…

  • Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

    The first thing you might notice about the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive is how effortlessly cosmopolitan they are. Smart, artsy, sexy — these undead are unequivocally cool. That’s no surprise when you consider this is the work of writer-director Jim Jarmusch, a purveyor of the idiosyncratic (Dead Man, Night on Earth, Ghost Dog:…

  • Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told (1967)

    The Merrye children of Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told don’t seem like they would have much to be merry about. The unfortunate brood suffers from a rare neurological disorder particular to their bloodline. As a voiceover narrator helpfully explain in the opening, at around the age of 10 or so, Merrye family…

  • American Hustle (2013)

    Beginning a major Hollywood picture with a bald guy working on a comb-over isn’t the most obvious of artistic choices. American Hustle starts with Christian Bale, paunchy and fleshy and in decidedly non-Dark Knight shape, fixing his thinning hair with a watchman’s precision. He glues down a massive comb-over and maneuvers a monstrous toupee before…

  • Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009)

    By the late 2000s, vampire was the new black. Between the popularity of the Twilight franchise and HBO’s True Blood, bloodsucking hadn’t been this lucky since the Wall Street bailout. … Which brings us to another vampire-centric tale, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. Truncating the first three novels of Darren Shan’s YA book series,…

  • Chaplin (1992)

    When Lord Richard Attenborough announced in the late 1980s his intention to make a biopic about Charlie Chaplin, the enterprise smacked of Oscar bait. Attenborough’s bloated prestige production, Gandhi, had nabbed the 1982 Academy Award for best picture, and Chaplin’s tumultuous life, peppered with scandals of sex and politics, was the stuff of epic storytelling. If Chaplin as subject…