The Comic

Nov 13, 1991 — Richard Lester’s Help! was the first of a new kind of rock-and-roll movie which altered the shape, face, and form of rock music. Before Help!, most of the rock-and-roll genre movies were simple, self contained films conceived in the narrowest...

Apr 14, 2026 — Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is a film about fear. That may not entirely jibe with its reputation as a biblical parody, but it might be the movie’s secret strength—why it continues to strike a nerve today. Many of...

Aug 28, 2024 — Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds are at their comedic best in this tale of parent-child bonding filled with Oedipal humor and emotional insight.

Apr 19, 2022 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable deploys barbed humor and surreal flourishes to depict class solidarity and human kindness in postwar Italy.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles takes aim at Hollywood’s way of representing race in this blistering satire about a white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned Black overnight.

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...

Sep 1, 2020 — It’s not impossible to be a lazy, shrug-it-off filmmaker, just as it isn’t to be a lazy painter or novelist, or, more to the point, a lazy comic artist, drawing each picture merely once and then moving on. (You could...

May 6, 2019 — With Police Story (1985) and Police Story 2 (1988), two anarchic, awe-inspiring action-comedies he directed, stunt-choreographed, and starred in, Jackie Chan bulldozed his way to movie immortality. The films’ intrepid, inventive stunt work might be what most catches the eye...

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

Nov 4, 2014 — In cinema history, there truly is no gag like a Tati gag.