Movies in the Comedy genre

The gulf is vast between what the studio wants us to think John Tucker Must Die is and what it really is. The marketers and publicists would have us believe this is a dark, edgy teen comedy about a band of two-timed girls taking revenge on the school...

It’s not hard to understand how something like Jojo Rabbit might divide audiences. Comedies about Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Third Reich can be difficult to sell, even if there’s an underlying seriousness to the subject matter. Writer/...

We all know the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses," and so does first time writer/director Darrick Borte, who has used that as the basis for his debut, called (appropriately enough) The Joneses. The subject matter is simple enough: Borte has ele...

Director David O. Russell doesn’t believe in resting on his laurels. Despite bringing back cast members Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert DeNiro, Joy isn’t an attempt to remake Silver Linings Playbook. In fact, the two films a...

When the focus is on comedy, Joy Ride hits and misses with gusto and some of its most outrageous gags deliver big laughs. The problem is that co-creator/director Adele Lim has delusions of crafting a dramatic foundation for the humor and the since...

What’s in a name? It would be disingenuous to assume that Nick Hornby was ignorant of the titillation value of calling something “Juliet, Naked.” However, to be clear, there’s nothing prurient about the movie. The title refers to a son...

Perhaps there are interesting directions in which the filmmakers could have taken the Jumanji series – after all, the 2017 reboot, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, was vast improvement over the mid-1990s original. Unfortunately, driven by Hol...

Every year, there are a handful of pleasant and unpleasant surprises in multiplexes. Count Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle among the former. A tremendous improvement over the tepid 1995 original, this quasi-sequel brings humor, fun performances,...

The new Ivan Reitman/Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy is a one-joke affair, and it takes surprisingly little time for the potential humor in the situation to wear thin. As a result, the viewer is left with about ninety minutes of suffering through S...

Juno may well be 2007's "Little Film That Could." You know the category - there's one every year. Last year's entry was Little Miss Sunshine. Word-of-mouth for Juno has been building since its World Premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in ear...