Search for Thriller/Comedy

At first glance, Inherent Vice might seem to be a detective story. Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that this is Paul Thomas Anderson's idea of a comedy. There's slapstick, lowbrow material, and enough strange characters an...

Killer Joe earns its NC-17 rating. A gleeful and unapologetic descent into delicious decadence, Killer Joe is proud of what it is and never tries to be something it isn't. A slick looking exploitation thriller from veteran director William Friedkin...

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the breezy directorial debut of Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black. Black knows film noir inside and out, because he uses the basic template here. He jazzes things up by employing an aware and self-deprecating narrator ...

In 2013, after making Side Effects, Stephen Soderbergh announced his retirement from feature filmmaking. Over the next few years, he kept busy, primarily as the main creative force behind the TV series The Knick, which he directed, executive p...

For those familiar with director Shane Black’s oeuvre, The Nice Guys is closer to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang than Iron Man 3. Featuring the same blend of high octane action and Tarantino-esque humor as Black’s 2005 debut, The Nice Guys doubles as a come...

Promising Young Woman, the auspicious, audacious debut feature of writer/actress-turned-director Emerald Fennell (she played Camilla Parker-Bowles in “The Crown”), defies classification. Is it a dark comedy with thriller overtones? Is it a...

I'm not sure whose idea it was to turn Red into a movie franchise. The first film, based on the DC Comics graphic novel, was an enjoyable throw-away, but there was nothing about the movie or its modest box office success that cried out for a second...

For about 75 minutes, Seven Psychopaths is a rollicking good movie - kinetic, clever, funny, and brutal. Then, inexplicably, it falls apart. Perhaps writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) didn't know how to end it, or perhaps his attempts to d...

The oddly-titled Sexy Beast (oddly titled because neither of the main characters is sexy, although both are certainly beasts) focuses on a husband's determination to honor a promise he made to his wife. The movie, the debut effort from British dir...

Stuck, like many in the thriller/comedy genre, has difficulty handling the tonal shifts between humor and suspense that exist within its framework. That's not to say the movie fails - there are times when it is bitingly funny and times when its bl...