Movies in the Comedy genre

With a title like Pain & Gain and Michael Bay at the helm, this review looked like a great opportunity for a vitriolic screed, but that's not going to happen. Defying expectations, Pain & Gain not only represents one of the best movies Bay has made...

In an attempt to say something positive about an otherwise disappointing movie, I’ll admit that it has a pretty good soundtrack, especially if ‘70s songs are your thing. As a pure comedy, Paint doesn’t work – it has a poor laugh-to-running...

Groundhog Day was released in 1993. For the next 20+ years, no major production touched the Twilight Zone-ish premise. Recently, however, a new generation of filmmakers has discovered Groundhog Day and decided to try their hands at expanding t...

Paper Heart is the latest in the so called "meta documentary" genre that mixes and tangles a fictional narrative with actual documentary footage. Like last year's American Teen, the ability to see the seams and sniff out the fictitious elements de...

It never fails to amaze me that something as essentially light and pointless as Disney's remake of The Parent Trap can clock in at over two hours in length. This is one of those movies that has difficulty sustaining any kind of comic or dramatic m...

Sally Potter’s quirky The Party owes a lot to a generation’s worth of French “gathering” films in which a bunch of characters come together for dinner (or something similar) and all hell breaks loose. Commonalities among these films in...

What is the difference between a bad melodrama and a good one? The key lies in the emotional response. If the viewer feels that he or she is being forced into reacting in a particular way because of "button pushing," the film makers have erred. ...

Paul is arguably the best science fiction comedy since Galaxy Quest. Despite being humorous in its outlook and providing numerous "Easter eggs" to fans of Star Wars, Aliens, Close Encounters, and E.T. (amongst others), this isn't a parody. Outside ...

After stumbling through a lackluster first 30 minutes that features all the tepid humor one might reasonably expect from a mediocre comedy, Paul Blart: Mall Cop does something unexpected: it becomes watchable, perhaps even passably enjoyable. That...

Gene Siskel infamously gave Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure a zero-star review, stating “Obviously, Pee-Wee is tolerable only in Pee-Wee doses…” Although that seems unnecessarily harsh, especially in retrospect (now that the film is commonly viewe...