74 Best Comedy Releases on Netflix (Page 4)
Never Have I Ever
SimilarAh! My Goddess, Dante's Cove, The Wallflower,
It’s time once again to return to Sherman Oaks High as Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s bittersweet teen comedy Never Have I Ever returns to Netflix. Picking up right where season one left off, we reunite with Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), her friends, family, and the surprisingly rich cast of secondary characters. Continue Reading →
Fatherhood
StudioBron Studios, Columbia Pictures,
Adapted from Matthew Logelin’s Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss and Love, written/directed by Paul Weitz, and co-written by Dana Schwartz, Fatherhood follows Matt (Kevin Hart), a father forced to raise his daughter alone when his wife Liz (Deborah Ayorinde) dies just after giving birth. Hart’s first big foray into dramatic acting has some heartwarming moments but is too bogged down by an awkward script and lack of dramatic weight. Continue Reading →
Tuca & Bertie
SimilarBlack Books Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Catterick,
Lisa Hanawalt’s beloved animated show Tuca & Bertie was prematurely canceled by Netflix back in July 2019. But less than a year later, Adult Swim took a risk by giving the show another life. If the first four episodes of the new season are anything to go on, the show only gets stronger, funnier, and more mature in its sophomore outing. Continue Reading →
Master of None
SimilarTaxi, The Head, The Nanny,
After a four-year absence, Master of None returns to Netflix with a new tone and new focus, but it still grapples with the same emotional beats of the first two seasons. This time around, creator Aziz Ansari focuses his efforts behind the camera, only appearing in two brief cameos in season three’s five-episode arc. Instead, all of the action is focused on Denise (Lena Waithe) and her partner Alicia (Naomi Ackie), who are rusticating in a cottagecore fantasy that not even TikTok could call sustainable. Rather than the buzz of traffic and the cramped quarters of the city, we see Denise and Alicia’s relationship develop against the bucolic splendor of open fields and towering trees. Continue Reading →
Thunder Force
Mere moments before the whole world shut down last year, I reviewed the Vin Diesel vehicle/comic adaptation Bloodshot. In that review, I talked about how the film often felt like a refuge from another time, an earlier era of superhero movies, and that there was a certain charm in that. Thunder Force similarly feels like a holdover from a different time, but as an anachronism, it offers far less charm. If Bloodshot felt like a pale but pleasant copy of films from the Raimi Spider-Man portion of the era, Thunder Force feels a bit more like Sky High’s cousin, obsessed with seeming more mature. Continue Reading →
Good Girls
In the first three episodes of Season 4 provided to critics, Good Girls one begins to feel a creeping sense of the same. The “girls”—Ruby (Retta), Beth (Christina Hendricks), and Annie (Mae Whitman)—are still jockeying for power with Rio (Manny Montana). Beth is finding herself, once more, in a sexually charge situation with a known felon—this time a hired killer named Mr. Fitzpatrick (Andrew McCarthy)—while her husband Dean (Matthew Lillard) is left in the dark in that and so many other ways. Ruby and Stan’s (Reno Wilson) child, this time their son, is getting in trouble, the kind of trouble their criminal endeavors make both easier and harder to deal with. A zealous federal agent, Phoebe Donnegan (Lauren Lapkus), is closing in on them all, too. Continue Reading →
Moxie
SimilarA Real Young Girl (1976), Copying Beethoven (2006),
Primal Fear (1996) The Holiday (2006), What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993),
There’s a story from Tina Fey’s Bossypants where Fey recalls a moment between Saturday Night Live castmates Amy Poehler and Jimmy Fallon. Poehler was cracking jokes, and Fallon feigned mock horror and commented “It’s not cute. I don’t like it.” Poehler reacted with “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” Poehler brings that “riot girl” attitude to her new film Moxie, a film adaptation of the 2017 book by Jennifer Mathieu. Moxie is a fun revolutionary take on the high school movie, even if it takes a while to find its footing. Continue Reading →
Ginny & Georgia
While Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia (created by Sarah Lampert) has so far been hailed as a sort of edgier Gilmore Girls, the new young adult series arguably has more in common with Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990), starring Cher and Winona Ryder. In essence: what if Cher’s Mrs. Flax kept two pistols in the house? Continue Reading →
To All the Boys: Always and Forever
SimilarFreedom Writers (2007), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991),
Primal Fear (1996) What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993),
In the wide world of algorithmically-derived Netflix teen romantic comedies, surely one of the finest was 2018's To All The Boys I've Loved Before, the syrupy-sweet story of adorable bookworm Lara Jean Covey (an always-radiant Lana Condor) and her shockingly-resilient relationship with too-good-to-be-true-except-he-is jock Peter (Noah Centineo). The film did well enough to spawn an entire trilogy based on Jenny Han's YA romances; while the second, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, still had its fair share of charms, it started to show the cracks in the sunny, conflict-free firmament of Lara Jean's fairy tale romance. Now, the trilogy closes with To All the Boys: Always and Forever, and this time, the decision isn't between Peter and some other boy: it's between Peter and the rest of her life. Continue Reading →
Cobra Kai
It's hard to know what to make of the '80s nostalgia boom that's hit pop culture in recent years -- that Stranger Things-y crystallization of an entire decade has permeated everything from prestige drama to Wonder Woman flicks, a throwback aesthetic revived for a newer generation (or, more accurately, the same generation who grew up in it and desperately clamors for the apparent simplicity of those times in a chaotic 21st century). But like so many things about our youth, it can be dangerous to romanticize it at the expense of our messy present. That's a lesson that, of all things, Cobra Kai understands more than most of its '80s-inspired kin. Continue Reading →
BoJack Horseman
As TV’s best series about mental illness and addiction comes to an end, our hero BoJack doesn’t get closure, exactly (because there’s really no such thing), but is further down the road to self-awareness and real insight than he ever was. He may end up making yet another bad decision based both on self-loathing and selfishness, but there has to be some reason he keeps getting another chance, another hit at the reset button. If you’ve ever struggled with depression and/or addiction, then you know how both wonderful and absolutely terrifying that feels. Though the final season stumbles a bit with extended bits on cancel culture and open relationships, it ends on a subtle, melancholy note: “Life’s a bitch, and then you go on living.” [Gena Radcliffe] Continue Reading →