David Cairns

Mitchell Leisen’s marvelously chic and brilliantly constructed screwball classic revolves around a heroine who flounders through a succession of complications but always manages to come out ahead.

A film about and against everything, this astonishingly original comedy attacks Big Brother, the bomb, and the incipient collapse of our planetary ecosystem, along with the lies that stop us from recognizing all of the above.

Set in the dying days of the 1960s, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors is a triumph of screenwriting and a brilliant showcase for then-unknown stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.

Drawn to high-risk productions and propelled by his own technical ingenuity, French director Albert Lamorisse crafted some of cinema’s most beguiling visions of childhood, animals, and flight.

Frank Capra’s flamboyant farce—his only black comedy—finds an uncharacteristically frenetic Cary Grant surrounded by a clan of genteel maniacs.

British cinema’s mad genius Ken Russell dispenses with history, chronology, genre, and taste in this wild reimagining of the great composer’s life.

In one of his most ambitious sequences, the silent-comedy legend throws his innocent “glasses” character into a death trap of a setting.

One of cinema’s most charismatic canines shows off his comedic chops in Leo McCarey’s screwball masterpiece The Awful Truth.

In 1921’s The Kid, Charlie Chaplin gave his lonely Tramp a five-year-old sidekick in Jackie Coogan, turning the boy into Hollywood’s first major child star.

In the image of the Little Tramp choking, Chaplin found the perfect motif for evoking the horrors of hunger and modern consumption.

In some of his most elaborately choreographed set pieces, the silent-comedy master confronted the chaos of the world with balletic grace and rhythmic precision.

David Cairns takes a close look at the carefully calibrated minimalism of Hal Ashby’s masterful satire.

The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.

François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.

In cinema history, there truly is no gag like a Tati gag.

For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.