494 Best Releases From the Genre Comedy (Page 8)
Magic Mike's Last Dance
SimilarBack to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third (2007),
In the climactic monologue of the original Magic Mike, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) says, “I don’t want to be a forty-year-old stripper.” It’s an affecting scene that shows that Mike understands the dead-end nature of his current lifestyle and his desire to escape, and it makes the ending where he gives stripping up a satisfying one. Continue Reading →
You People
SimilarBeverly Hills Cop (1984), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), The Holiday (2006), True Romance (1993),
A household name (and one of the most in-demand creators of color) in network TV and Hollywood over the last decade, Kenya Barris has shepherded tv sitcom universes like Black-ish/Grown-ish/Mixed-ish, collaborated on box office smashes like Girls Trip, and developed franchise revival attempts like Shaft and Coming 2 America. Within these projects, his central preoccupation has been negotiating authenticity in relation to race, class, family, and the self. Continue Reading →
Shotgun Wedding
The market for romantic comedies surrounding weddings is right up Jennifer Lopez's avenue. Last year it was Marry Me. Before that, it was The Wedding Planner. But whether she was piercing hearts with her eyes in Out of Sight, or turning up the heat with her performance in Hustlers, Lopez continues to surprise us with her versatility. Shotgun Wedding is more com than rom, allowing Lopez to exercise her killer comedic timing, along with an all-star cast present for a destination wedding that goes sideways. Continue Reading →
Shrinking
Grief hits us all differently. For therapist Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel, also one of three Shrinking creators), the death of his wife led him to a year-long bender. The audience encounters him on his last night of drinking, drugs, and sex workers whom he pays not for sex but just to hang out with him. His neighbor Liz’s (Christa Miller) repeated pleas to stop waking her and her husband Derek (Ted McGinley) in the middle of the night with his “parties” finally break through. Continue Reading →
Sometimes I Think About Dying
The first films we saw in this year's festival deal with the anxieties of parenthood and personhood.
(This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.)
Film festivals, Sundance in particular, are often the domain of the solid three-star movie -- unremarkable but workable indies and debuts that prove the arrival (or resurgence) of a major talent, albeit without the polish that would make the work they're bringing you feel complete. And that was certainly the case for my first day at (virtual) Sundance, with a quartet of titles covering similar thematic ground and running out of steam long before the end credits roll. Put together, this crop of films collectively explored the loneliness and isolation of the human experience, not to mention the specific vagaries of (cis)womanhood, especially where children are concerned. And they were... okay, I guess? Continue Reading →
That '90s Show
That ‘70s Show That ’70s Show first aired on Fox in 1998. Throughout the seasons, viewers watched Eric Forman (Topher Grace) and his motley crew of friends as they got into hijinks in ’70s Wisconsin. The friends often met in Eric’s basement, forging bonds through pot-fueled smoky clouds. There were highs, both metaphorically and literally, culminating in a finale in 2006. It’s only fitting that the nostalgia trip continues with the spinoff That ’90s Show. It’sa fun sequel series that plays with elements of the original series while establishing its own path. Continue Reading →
Night Court
NetworkNBC,
SimilarNed's Declassified School Survival Guide, The Munsters,
Night Court’s first time on the television dial ran nine seasons from 1984 to 1992. Throughout its run, NBC paired it with such sitcom titans as The Cosby Show, Cheers, and Family Ties. Far and away the oddest of the quartet, it never caught fire critically or creatively in the same way. Nonetheless, its off-center charms worked their magic on enough people to make it a syndicated favorite and to get referenced by the likes of 30 Rock. Continue Reading →
Jethica
What if the one person you wanted to forget simply wouldn’t forget you, even after they died? That’s the premise of Pete Ohs’ new film Jethica, at its best a high-concept comedy with the sunburnt edge of desert noir, but the trouble is waiting between labored set-ups and too-big performance notes to get to them. Ohs has many opportunities to mine the scenario for a weightier emotional core but leaves it in favor of a kind of affectless box-ticking. That is Ohs’ style, to be clear; it just seems fundamentally at war with itself. A comedy with no jokes, a horror movie with no scares, a ghost movie with no interest in the particulars of the afterlife or the terror of dying. It’s a little of a lot and a lot of too little. Continue Reading →
Velma
NetworkHBO Max,
SimilarFamily Guy, Hina Logic: From Luck & Logic, Raven's Home,
StarringSam Richardson,
Studio3 Arts Entertainment,
The character of Velma Dinkley inhabits a strange place in the Scooby-Doo franchise. In the context of the shows, she is arguably the most integral member of Mystery Inc, as her intelligence and skepticism make her most likely to solve the mystery first. However, as a supporting character in a franchise that focuses on Scooby and Shaggy’s antics, she is pushed to the sidelines and most viewers remember her catchphrase of “Jinkies” more than they remember her. Continue Reading →
Koala Man
Koala Man may be a brand-new Hulu cartoon, but viewers sitting down to watch its first season may feel like they’ve stumbled onto a rerun. The show’s steady stream of apocalyptic threats and graphic deaths echoes executive producer Justin Roiland’s Rick and Morty, and its animation style is disappointingly derivative of Bento Box Entertainment’s adult cartoons (Hoops or Brickleberry, for instance, though Aussie studio Princess Bento produced Koala Man itself). It may be the only small-screen program dedicated to a middle-aged dude in a koala mask fighting crime, but Koala Man is far too derivative for its own good. Continue Reading →
6 de enero
The January 6th Capitol riot was, simply put, pandemonium. For those in the Capitol Building during the first week of 2021, when supporters of the former President egged his followers into committing a violent attack on Congress in a feeble attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidency, it became a horror movie. Knowledge was sparse and with every passing minute, the lack of details given to members of Congress signaled a rapidly changing situation. Discovery+’s new documentary on the event, January 6th, is quite the opposite. It’s measured in its approach, outlining this event in painstaking detail. Continue Reading →
A Man Called Otto
There is a Tom Hanks factor that ends up elevating whatever material he takes on. As has often been observed, he’s the closest thing to a modern-era Jimmy Stewart. Like Stewart, Hanks has made an effort to complicate his nice guy persona in this third act of his career. A Man Called Otto is the latest comparison point. While not especially risky, this remake of the 2015 Danish film A Man Called Ove still has an edge. That the film survives its journey to the States with that sharpness intact is something audiences can chalk up to the Hanks Factor. Continue Reading →
Paul T. Goldman
Paul T. Goldman isn’t funny, per se. Like its titular lead subject (real name Paul Finkelman), there’s an awkwardness that will leave all but the least sympathetically embarrassed feeling itchy. It is frequently strange. It’s perplexingly over the top and all over the place. It rings out laughs, but most are distinctively of the “too awkward to do anything but giggle” variety. So, no, not especially funny. Continue Reading →
White Noise
What makes a novel “unfilmable”? Often, it’s because it’s simply too large in scope and scale, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which depicts the lives of seven generations of the same family. Or, as with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it’s too dense and labyrinthian. The more successful attempts, such as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman, have been filmed in multiple parts, while failures like 2017’s The Dark Tower condense the story down to its most basic components, checking off the most salient points (“there was a tower, it was dark”) and nothing more. Continue Reading →
Rugrats
The Christmas industrial complex quickly consumes the whole of pop culture. One can barely slip the surly bonds of October 31st before being inundated with a whirlwind of tinsel-tinged music, decorations, and of course, T.V. specials. There’s nothing wrong with that! While the totality of it can be overwhelming at times, even for enthusiasts, there’s something downright pleasant about a big communal celebration touching the whole of society in some way, including our favorite television shows. Continue Reading →
Abbott Elementary
Andor (Disney+)
It’s strange how politics and bureaucracy are, in part, what made the Star Wars prequels such a stultifying affair while they give Andor a jolt that’s a large part of its charm. Nonetheless, thanks to excellent performances from the likes of Denise Gough as Imperial officer Dedra Meero and Kyle Soller as disgraced space cop Syril Karn, that was the reality of 2022. Continue Reading →
Boys With Toys
A project that director/co-writer Barry Levinson had been working on for over a decade before it emerged in theaters in 1992—at one point, it had been planned as his directorial debut before he turned to Diner (1982) instead—Toys offered viewers a mélange of holiday sentiment, strident anti-war satire and the sometimes-unholy combination of schmaltz and schtick that marked the typical Robin Williams performance of the time, all produced on a budget high enough to outstrip the GNP of actual countries. There's no reason on Earth to think that such a bizarre combination would have worked, and Toys' eventual critical and commercial failure would seemingly confirm that it didn't. And yet, while I concede that the film as a whole is a mess—it is an undeniably intriguing mess with just enough moments of genuine brilliance to help get through the rougher and clumsier passages, of which there are more than a few. Continue Reading →
Babylon
SimilarLucky Number Slevin (2006), Maria Full of Grace (2004), My Own Private Idaho (1991),
Watch afterAnt-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), The Whale (2022),
Babylon is a frenetic crash course in Hollywood history that plays fast and loose with most of its facts. However, it still paints a vivid portrait of Tinseltown from its birth to the behemoth it is today. You won’t find the meticulous and mind-boggling commitment to detail of Mank (most of Margot Robbie’s costuming looks more 2010s than 1920s). Still, director and screenwriter Damien Chazelle is less interested in getting everything right than translating that history into something an audience can feel in their bones. Continue Reading →
The Recruit
From The Flight Attendant to The Rookie, there’s no shortage of comedy action series, flipping the script of formulaic procedurals and infusing a dose of relatable, if often quirky, characters as leads. Netflix looks to add to the roster with the new series The Recruit, which follows a dashing but stumbly new CIA lawyer Owen (Noah Centineo), as he falls deeper into internal espionage. While The Recruit gets muddled with an unbalanced tone, Centineo jumps in with enough charm and comedy to keep viewers coming back. Continue Reading →
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
SimilarDie Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), Free Willy (1993), Godzilla Raids Again (1955), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006), Superman Returns (2006),
Watch afterBlack Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022),
As Puss in Boots: The Last Wish begins, it’s evident that this movie is aiming for a different vibe compared to not only the first Puss in Boots but the greater Shrek series as a whole. A visual aesthetic that evokes hand-drawn animation and rapid-fire editing summons memories of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or fellow 2022 DreamWorks Animation project The Bad Guys rather than Shrek the Third. Even the handful of pop culture references are more specific and idiosyncratic—Nicolas Cage’s take on The Wicker Man, for instance—than the very broad references the original Shrek movies became famous for. Continue Reading →
The Last Kingdom
Lars Von Trier is a complicated figure. The Danish director has ardent fans, fervent critics, and a whole host of international film watchers in-between. After 25 years of varying other projects, he returns to his favorite hospital in The Kingdom Exodus, the five-episode third and final season of his acclaimed supernatural series. The sepia-toned world hasn’t changed much, though, as Von Trier has gone through several scandals, health concerns, and personal challenges over the last two-and-a-half decades. His vision remains undeterred. Continue Reading →