Black comedy laughs where laughing feels forbidden, which is exactly why it works. This tag collects reviews of dark comedies: death, disaster, and taboo played for laughs that cost something.
2000sSouthland Tales (2006) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Richard Kelly took an unfinished cut to Cannes because nobody turns down a competition slot, was booed, recut it, and watched it earn under four hundred thousand dollars.…
1990sNatural Born Killers (1994) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Oliver Stone made a satire about media appetite for violence that is itself a two-hour delivery system for violence. Tarantino wrote the story, disowned it, and asked…
1940sInglourious Basterds (2009) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Tarantino wrote it in 1998, could not solve the ending, made Kill Bill instead, and came back a decade later. The opening scene is a twenty-five minute conversation…
1960sLolita (1962) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kubrick adapted a novel about a predator by removing everything the Production Code forbade, which was most of the subject. He later said that had he understood the censorship…
1980sAmerican Psycho (2000) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mary Harron read a novel everybody called unfilmable and found the comedy in it. Made for seven million dollars, mostly in Toronto, and it is far funnier and…
1990sThe Big Lebowski (1998) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Raymond Chandler plot handed to a man with no interest in solving it. Failed on release, found its people later, and now has a festival and…
2010sParasite (2019) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A house built on a vertical axis, a family climbing it, and a genre change at the midpoint that almost no film survives. The first non-English winner of Best…
2020sTriangle of Sadness (2022) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A luxury cruise, a great deal of vomit, and an island where the toilet manager is in charge. Blunt satire in three parts, and the third one…
1980sBrazil (1985) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A clerical error kills the wrong man and a whole film proceeds from a typo. The most internally consistent world in the genre, and Gilliam fought Universal for two…
AmbiguityA cat catches a hamster behind the dryer, pins his tail, and gives him a choice: find her missing kitten or get eaten. He goes down into a pipe no cat can follow, finds the kitten, and finds out why…
1980sNicolas Cage delivers one of the most committed and bizarre performances ever as a yuppie who thinks he's turning into a vampire. Vampire's Kiss earns its 6.5 as a fascinating, deeply strange film that is far more interesting as a…
1940sA magazine columnist who has fabricated her domestic Connecticut life must host a war hero and her publisher for Christmas. Christmas in Connecticut is Peter Godfrey's 1945 American romantic comedy about a magazine columnist whose readers believe she lives on…
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