Tag: Comedy

  • The 10 best female buddy films

    Big-screen portrayals of female friendship are far less common than those of their male counterparts—unless, that is, the female buddy movie revolves around romance. When not focused on menfolk and how to snag one, the movies of classic Hollywood were often flat-out ambivalent about friendships among women. Even some of the best of classic Hollywood,…

  • The 10 best screwball comedies

    From car radios to Social Security, some good things emerged from the Great Depression––the screwball comedy being one of them. After all, the genre was very much about humiliating the upper-class. Painting the nation’s wealthy as ridiculous, eccentric and stupid was more than welcome when millions of Americans were out of work or losing their…

  • The 10 best R-rated comedies

    Let’s not beat around the bush. Dirty jokes are pretty damn funny. The best R-rated comedies aren’t just crude, however. They’re giddily transgressive, pushing past politeness and dragging the audience along with them. Laughter is the best medicine, but sometimes adults need something a little stronger than aspirin or a Z-Pak. These are my picks…

  • Killer Joe (2011)

    Brutal, pulpy and lurid. That sums up the irresistible allure of Killer Joe – provided, that is, you find deep-fried perversity to be irresistible. The second collaboration between director William Friedkin and writer Tracy Letts (their first being 2006’s Bug) serves up trailer-trash noir as savage as it is savagely funny. You will be forgiven…

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

    There isn’t much middle ground when it comes to how one feels about writer-director Wes Anderson. His meticulously fussy visual style, offbeat humor and unflagging quirkiness have won both ardent fans and equally ardent detractors; one viewer’s delight is another’s eye-rolling preciousness. The Grand Budapest Hotel, quintessential Anderson, will not woo the unconverted. As with…

  • A Serious Man (2009)

    Larry Gopnik, the mild-mannered protagonist of Joel and Ethan Coens’ A Serious Man, is in a doozy of an existential crisis. His wife is leaving him for another man. He is being financially and psychologically squeezed by his self-absorbed children. And just as this college physics professor is on the cusp of receiving tenure, Larry’s…

  • Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

    I love Moonrise Kingdom. There, I said it. End of review. OK, that’s not really the end. Pardon my rapturous take, but writer-director Wes Anderson appears to be one of very few filmmakers who can truly capture the strange world of adolescent love — its exuberance, its earnestness and its flat-out weirdness. Anderson’s best works,…

  • The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

    In its tale of death and loyalty along the U.S.-Mexico border, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada bears similarities to the great westerns of John Ford. Like that masterful storyteller, director Tommy Lee Jones (in his big-screen directorial debut) and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga revel in the splendor of nature and the small, lyrical moments of…