Category Archives: Comedy films

Roger Michell: a quiet genius still hitting his stride | Peter Bradshaw

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The director’s death aged 65 is a huge blow for British cinema, whose very best qualities – of wit, intelligence and subtlety – Michell exemplified

Roger Michell was the TV and movie director who had a midas touch with actors and with a particular type of English material: witty, literate, poignant and romantic. Michell was a master at directing anything on the continuum between Jane Austen and Richard Curtis, and knew what animated both.

Related: Roger Michell – a career in pictures

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Michelle Yeoh: ‘Jackie Chan thought women belonged in the kitchen – until I kicked his butt’

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The kung fu goddess talks about her most eye-popping stunts, her yearning to do another Crazy Rich Asians, and her outrageously enjoyable new Marvel movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Ten minutes into my conversation with Michelle Yeoh, there is a misunderstanding. We are discussing her character in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, an outrageously enjoyable new Marvel adventure about a San Francisco parking valet trying to ignore his destiny as a martial arts warrior. Yeoh plays Ying Nan, a beneficent gatekeeper who lives on the far side of an enchanted bamboo forest. Another character, played by Awkwafina, refers to Ying as “an awesome magical kung fu goddess”. When I mention this, Yeoh thinks Awkwafina made the remark about her. “Oh, that’s so sweet!” she says. “Of course, I already knew Awkwafina because we were both in Crazy Rich Asians.”

There’s no need to point out the error, because it is perfectly true: Yeoh really is an awesome magical kung fu goddess. No one would argue with that. Not the millions who gasped as she skipped nimbly up walls and across rooftops in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Nor the ones who flocked to her early Hong Kong action movies with the likes of Jackie Chan and Cynthia Rothrock. Not the ones who were first introduced to her in the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. And certainly not Oliver Stone, who called her “a woman of elegance and magnificent grace – the young grande dame of Hong Kong cinema”. Nor Quentin Tarantino, who rushed to her bedside when she was in a body cast for a dislocated neck and cracked rib sustained after falling 18ft on to her head while filming The Stunt Woman in 1996. “He insisted on seeing me and sat on two pillows at my feet and recounted my movies frame by frame,” she later said.

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‘Marty just kept following me!’ Steve Martin and Martin Short on their 35-year friendship

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The comic legends clicked on the set of 1986’s Three Amigos and have been a double act since. They talk fame, fatherhood and finding inspiration for their new series in Murder, She Wrote

It is when I hear myself quoting Steve Martin and Martin Short’s jokes back at the men themselves, from films they made decades ago, that I know for certain that I am not going to get through this interview with my dignity intact.

“And then you said this, Steve, and then, Marty, you made that face – and I loved that!” I burble.

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Zola review – pulp-factual viral tweet becomes an icily slick urban thriller

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Aziah ‘Zola’ Wells’s viral story of her crazily dangerous 2015 trip to Florida in search of pole-dancing money is brought to the screen with seductive comedy

In 2015, a part-time dancer from Detroit called Aziah “Zola” Wells went viral with a cheeky Twitter thread purporting to tell the pulp-factual tale of her recent, crazily dangerous road trip to Florida with someone called Jessica, whom she’d only just met. This woman had persuaded Zola there was big money in pole-dancing for rich clients in Tampa, but Zola had to share the car with Jessica’s creepy boyfriend and even creepier pimp, and soon it was clear that Zola was going to have to do much more than dance. She was in way over her head.

Or was she? Followers of Zola’s posts loved them at least partly for how outrageously unreliable they were: Zola was clearly embellishing, or pre-emptively giving her side of the story before Jessica did the same. Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.

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The Suicide Squad review – eyeball-blitzing supervillain reboot

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Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn is a good directorial fit for the humour and freaky violence of DC’s bad-guy jamboree

DC’s new Suicide Squad movie announces itself as different from the coolly received first film from 2016 simply by adding “The” to the title, maybe sneakily trying for an unacknowledged rebrand or reboot. James Gunn, also in charge of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, is brought on board as director and co-writer. This second Squad outing (if you don’t count last year’s standalone Harley Quinn adventure Birds of Prey) is a long, loud, often enjoyable and amusing film that blitzes your eyeballs and eardrums and covers all the bases. There is Guardians-style comedy mixing humans and talking animals, there is freaky violence – including what I have to say is a gruesomely impressive interior-anatomical shot, showing a knife plunging into the still-beating heart – and there is colossal CGI spectacle for the final act in which a giant thing runs rampant in a city, while the gang look up at it; a trope that has become almost legally mandatory for superhero movies.

Viola Davis once again brings a touch of class to the Suicide Squad franchise as the chillingly manipulative security chief Amanda Waller who now springs supervillain Bloodsport (Idris Elba) from jail so that he can head up an elite new crew of misfits, desperadoes and undesirables. These include Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the ironically belligerent Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark – a great big talking shark in Hulk-ish stretchy shorts – voiced by Sylvester Stallone, Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior), who commands an army of rats wherever she goes, and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who fires molten polka-dots at the enemy, revving himself up for the task by imagining that this is his overbearing mother. There is also a kind of B-team of Squadders whose job is to be hilariously expendable.

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Riders of Justice review – Mads Mikkelsen revenge thriller turns screwball

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Anders Thomas Jensen’s film is far-fetched, tonally wayward and shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it all comes together

The poster image of a grey-bearded, shaven-headed, tooled-up, mean-looking Mads Mikkelsen, combined with that title, might set alarm bells ringing … along the lines of, “Oh no, he’s doing a Taken.” Blessedly, rather than giving us a straightahead middle-aged revenge thriller, this unpredictable Danish film takes apart the whole trope. There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.

Mikkelsen plays Markus, a military commander who is recalled from Afghanistan when his wife is killed in a train crash. He might have a particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson would put it, but emotional intelligence is not one of them. Markus refuses counselling and struggles to connect with his teenage daughter. Fortunately, along comes Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a maths geek who happened to be on the same train as Markus’s wife. He is accompanied by eccentric sidekicks Lennart (Lars Brygmann), and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). They are convinced the crash was not an accident but a targeted killing connected to a violent biker gang.

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Hear me out: why Confessions of a Shopaholic isn’t a bad movie

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The latest in our series of writers defending maligned films is a reconsideration of a critically loathed 2009 comedy

When Confessions of a Shopaholic, directed by PJ Hogan, of Muriel’s Wedding acclaim, was released in 2009 – a year that brought us the high-octane, male-dominated likes of The Hangover, Sherlock Holmes and Inglourious Basterds – it was the tail end of the romcom’s golden age. And, just like its genre-mates released that year – Bride Wars, He’s Just Not That Into You, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – Shopaholic received a wave of scathing reviews, weighing in at just 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Related: Hear me out: why Ishtar isn’t a bad movie

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Ned Beatty: the good ol’ boy who made playing the ordinary guy look easy

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From his breakthrough in Deliverance to a memorable turn in Toy Story 3, the authenticity of Beatty’s middleman gone bad made him the perfect co-star – and often stole the show

If ever a character actor personified the “good ol’ boy” archetype of Hollywood’s new cinema of the 1970s it was Ned Beatty from Louisville, Kentucky, whose broad, open, good-natured face seemed so often to be covered with a sheen of sweat – either from suppressed guilt, or tension, from discomfort in whatever sweltering southern clime he happened to find himself. His was a smiley face bounded by its prosperous double-chin and nascent combover, a face that lent reality and approachability to the movies: an authentic and worldly presence.

Ned Beatty had the hardest role to play: the middle-ranking ordinary guy: lawyer, cop, official, politician and maybe, effectively, the wingman to the conventionally better-looking male leads, and in his 70s movie heyday this tended to mean Burt Reynolds, with whom he starred in six films, including, of course, Beatty’s brilliant and brutal breakthrough: Deliverance (1972), written by James Dickey and directed by John Boorman, in which Reynolds’s sinister alpha male businessman leads his buddies Beatty, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox on a vacation canoeing trip through the deepest Georgia wilderness only to come into horrible contact with hillbillies playing banjos and bearing grudges.

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Lucky review – spirited Ghanaian romcom captures the social media age

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An idling student enlists the help of a wideboy friend in pursuit of a hot date in a comedy that veers between likable and laddish

Here is a vibrant, idiosyncratic portrait of Ghanaian youth, bursting with wisecracks and a boyish restlessness. There is an amateurish shakiness to the visuals, but the film overcomes this with a lot of charm and an innate understanding of its young subjects.

Related: 20 best African films – ranked!

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‘Rehab made me grateful to be alive’: Margaret Cho on sobriety, solitude and Stop Asian Hate

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One of the world’s most outrageous comedians, Cho is helping to lead the battle to end racism against Asian-Americans. She discusses hatred, hope and how humour saved her life

● Warning: this article contains discussion of suicide from the start

The thing about being a standup comedian is that you can never turn off that part of your brain, not even when you are trying to kill yourself. Margaret Cho learned this in 2013 when she attempted suicide in a hotel room, using a shower curtain rail. “It started bending and I was like: Oh shit, I’m too fat to kill myself, so I had to get down,” says Cho. “I thought: I’ll go on a diet and I’ll try again when I reach my goal weight, which means I’m never going to kill myself, because I’ll never reach my goal weight.”

The 52-year-old Emmy-, Grammy- and Oscar-nominated comedian, author, actor and podcaster lets out a delighted cackle. “That joke … people get really upset. They’re like: ‘You should put in a trigger warning.’ I don’t know how to do a trigger warning!” The point Cho is trying to make is a serious one. “My sense of humour probably saved me from dying,” she says. “You can’t really shut that part of you off, because humour is really hope. Humour and laughter is the intake of breath, which is the preservation of the body for the next moment … at your darkest moments; it’s actually the thing that shines the brightest. I’m really grateful for it and I’m really grateful I got to live.”

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Nobody review – Bob Odenkirk betters John Wick in fun action caper

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The Better Call Saul star gets a furiously entertaining star vehicle playing a suburban father who finds himself up against the Russian mob

For any vaguely fit actor over the age of 50, being given your own Taken was briefly seen as an enviable career boost, a chance to relive former glories, a slickly choreographed leap from an early Hollywood grave back to the sandlot. Ever since Liam Neeson swapped emoting for punching back in 2008, Kevin Costner, Sean Penn, John Travolta, Pierce Brosnan and Guy Pearce all tried to do the same but audiences wisely stayed away from their sub-par shoot-em-ups and execs were forced to realise that, duh, it’s the star rather than the sub-genre that people are magnetically drawn to. Because Neeson’s shtick was continuing to bring in solid crowds while his peers were flailing and in 2014, Keanu Reeves found a similar sweet spot with John Wick, kicking off a hugely profitable new series with a Taken-adjacent combination of simple action plot and much-loved actor.

Related: Chaos Walking review – cursed YA adaptation stumbles into view

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Diane Keaton’s 10 best performances – ranked!

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With the Oscar winner’s romcom Love, Weddings & Other Disasters out next month in the UK, we run through her greatest roles

Some of the jokes in Sleeper are as dated as the special effects (and they looked creaky enough nearly 50 years ago). But Keaton is ethereally lovely as Luna, a socialite from the future. As always, there is an intelligence to her performance that lifts her above the weaker material, such as Woody Allen’s character floating around a field in a hydrovac suit.

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The 20 best Michelle Pfeiffer films – ranked!

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She blazed a trail as gangsters’ molls and slinky lounge acts, then returned from a career break to essay a variety of wicked witches, comic turns and grand dames. Next month she’ll be seen as a penniless heiress in acclaimed comedy French Exit. But which are her best roles?

Kenneth Branagh’s all-star revival of the classic Agatha Christie murder mystery gives us a traditional exotic cross-section of high society (with picturesque servants and bits of rough) on board the snowed-in Orient Express, on which someone has been whacked. The film has Pfeiffer in one of her late-career grande dame roles: the manhunting American widow Mrs Hubbard, which she plays a little softer than Lauren Bacall, who had had the role in the 1974 version. Pfeiffer sang the melancholy Never Forget over the end credits, with lyrics by Branagh.

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Sacha Baron Cohen: ‘If you’re protesting against racism, you’re going to upset some racists’

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Stopping Trump, reforming Facebook and risking his life to make a Borat sequel. In an exclusive interview, the actor unveils his plans for a revolution – and reveals how it feels to come out as himself

Seven months ago, Sacha Baron Cohen was in the back of a speeding ambulance. It was an escape car, and he was fleeing a gun rally. The Borat producers had chosen the ambulance as it could blend in, accommodate a small film crew and, if necessary, hasten a trip to hospital.

Baron Cohen – dressed as Borat, himself disguised as a country singer – had just led the crowd of far-right conspiracy theorists in a singalong. At first, they happily joined in: “Obama, what we gonna do? / Inject him with the Wuhan flu.” Then one or two smelled a rat. Then they all stormed the stage.

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52 perfect romcoms for Valentine’s day in lockdown

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For Richard Curtis it’s Gregory’s Girl, Gurinder Chadha prefers Tootsie and Katy Brand goes for Dirty Dancing. Whatever your relationship status, here are the film and TV romances to curl up with

When I wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, I wanted it to be half as good as Gregory’s Girl. John Gordon-Sinclair is so natural, and his best friend, Robert Buchanan, is the funniest movie best friend ever. Then it has the most brilliant plot twist and the definitive final romantic conversation with Clare Grogan, dancing on her back under a tree. If anyone’s thinking of writing a romantic comedy, this is the place to start: not with Hollywood stars and pop songs, but with the low-key, local, truthful bliss of Bill Forsyth’s first masterpiece. Richard Curtis, screenwriter and director

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Dead Pigs review – winding tale of life in cash-crazed Shanghai

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Cathy Yan’s sprawling drama uses a real-life discovery of 16,000 porcine corpses to pick away at Chinese commercialism

A breezily westernised style of Chinese movie is on offer in this 2018 debut feature from Chinese-American film-maker Cathy Yan, who two years later went to Hollywood to direct Birds of Prey, starring Margot Robbie. Dead Pigs is an ensemble dramedy set in Shanghai that satirises – in a distinctly lenient way – the commercialism eating away at China’s heart. It is inspired by a real-life incident in which thousands of dead pigs were found in the city’s Huangpu river, dumped by poverty-stricken farmers who couldn’t pay the disposal fees; the pig symbolism reminded me a tiny bit of Alan Bennett’s A Private Function.

Related: 52 perfect comfort films – to watch again and again

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Coda review – formulaic yet sweet-natured crowd-pleaser

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A hearing girl with a deaf family is torn between two worlds in a well-intentioned but conventional attempt to win over audiences

There’s an earnest old-fashioned Sundance-ness to writer-director Sian Heder’s broad comedy-drama Coda, the kind of warm-hearted crowd-pleaser that the festival is most widely known for. In any normal year, it would probably have been met with audible approval throughout its premiere. But this isn’t a normal year, with the majority of festival goers watching the film at home, perhaps less pumped up by the thrill of seeing it with a crowd. With or without an audience, it’s a minor film, a little too formulaic at times, a tad too comfortable sticking to a dog-eared playbook, eager to be loved but not really trying hard enough to be remembered.

Related: Sundance 2021: which films might break out this year?

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‘I was appalled to be tarred as misogynist’: Variety critic hits back at Carey Mulligan’s sexism accusations

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Exclusive: Dennis Harvey, the critic whose review of Promising Young Woman prompted outrage from its star and an apology from his editors, has spoken out

Dennis Harvey, the veteran film critic whose review of Promising Young Woman has sparked a furore across the industry, has hit back at accusations of misogyny amid calls for Variety to fire him.

Harvey’s review was published more than a year ago, following the film’s premiere at the Sundance film festival. Largely positive, it called Mulligan’s performance “skilful, entertaining and challenging” while also querying the central casting. While “a fine actress”, wrote Harvey, Mulligan “seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale”.

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The director who dared to suggest Jewish men don’t need rescuing by blond women

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The late film-maker Joan Micklin Silver exploded the cliches of modern romances. If only others would do the same

The director Joan Micklin Silver, who died last week, was – to use the kind of cliche she abhorred – a pioneer. She was a female director at a time when studio executives were more than comfortable with being openly sexist, telling Silver: “Women directors are one more problem we don’t need.”

She made distinctly Jewish movies, as opposed to the kind of Jewish-lite movies that were – and are still – Hollywood’s more usual style. Her two greatest films, Hester Street (1975), about a Jewish immigrant couple (Steven Keats and Carol Kane) on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, and the peerless 1988 romcom Crossing Delancey, about a modern young woman (Amy Irving) who is reluctantly fixed up with a pickle seller (Peter Riegert), are to When Harry Met Sally what the Netflix series Shtisel is to Seinfeld: Jewish as opposed to merely Jew-ish.

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Why Mr Bean and Borat are ready to retire

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Rowan Atkinson and Sacha Baron Cohen are killing off two of comedy’s most indelible characters. They’ve picked the perfect time

Nothing lasts for ever. In time the trees will wither, the seas will boil and the mountains will crumble to dust. And nothing reinforces the ephemeral cruelty of the universe like the news that Rowan Atkinson doesn’t want to be Mr Bean any more.

In an interview with the Radio Times this week, Atkinson said of Mr Bean: “I don’t much enjoy playing him. The weight of responsibility is not pleasant. I find it stressful and exhausting, and I look forward to the end of it.” And that’s fair enough; Mr Bean has now been a going concern for 31 years, and has taken the form of a television programme, two films, an animated series, a sketch performed for the Olympics nine years ago and – slightly improbably – four books.

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