The Tiger Hunter (2016) – Danny Pudi (Abed from the cult sitcom Community) plays an engineer who travels from his village in India, where he runs the local electronic repair shop, to Chicago to take a high-paying position in an American firm. He’s determined to live up to the reputation of his father, revered in […]
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s screwball satire of cold war posturing and mutually assured destruction, is the funniest film ever made about nuclear holocaust. But it didn’t begin as a comedy. The source novel, Peter George’s “Red Alert,” was a grave contemplation of the […]
Keri Russell glows in Waitress (2007), the sweet, sour and sexy film by actress-turned-filmmaker Adrienne Shelly. She is amazingly funny as Jenna, the melancholy pie queen of a highway eatery in a vaguely drawn small Southern town. This is a place where the waitresses call each other “Hon” and toss in a little good-natured attitude […]
“You interested in joining the CIA? The benefits are great. The trick in not getting killed. That’s the key to the whole benefits program.” Ever had a relative who thinks they’re part of the CIA? Ever had one who really was? The original The In-Laws (1979) tackles both at once and delivers one of the […]
Wet Hot American Summer (2001) has lived longer than anyone would have predicted while watching it in 2001. The self-aware summer camp spoof/nostalgia lampoon spawned a prequel and a sequel series for Netflix that play out in the same cheeky, silly, self-aware manner of adult actors playing at being teenagers. It feels as much an […]
One of the surprises in the 2015 Oscar nominations was that Force Majeure (Sweden, 2014), Sweden’s official entry for the foreign language film category and a Cannes film festival winner, did not place among the five nominated films. Director Ruben Östlund gives us a family on vacation and what appears to be the inciting event […]
Peter Segel joined the ranks of Freaks and Geeks alumni who went on to successful writing and/or directing careers (the list includes James Franco, Seth Rogan, and John Francis Daley) with Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), which he wrote and starred in for producer Judd Apatow. It’s a plot you can recount in a sentence—a guy […]
In Love and Death (1975), Woody Allen spoofs epic Russian literature, Chekov plays, and Bergman movies with a mix of philosophical vaudeville and Borscht Belt one-liners and sight gags. It was his sixth feature as a director and his third screen appearance with Diane Keaton, who gets as many punchlines as Allen does, and often […]
Four years after Steven Soderbergh’s “retirement” from feature filmmaking (he found a loophole by making Behind the Candelabra for HBO and creating and directing the cable series The Knick), he returned to the big screen with Logan Lucky (2017), a bouncy, deft, sweetly and cleverly comic heist picture about a pair of hard-luck brothers in […]
When singer Frankie Laine was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air many years ago, he confessed that when he was engaged to record the theme song to Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974), he was not told that the film (and the song) was a spoof. He simply thought it was a bad song […]
