Personal Lists featuring...

Bridesmaids 2011

2

Includes all the films of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Book, including films culled to make way for newer releases, up to the 2021 edition.

50

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-romantic-comedies-of-all-time/

UPDATED: 2/13/24

5

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/essential-comedy-movies/

UPDATED: 1/29/24

16

Hollywood Reporter critics pick the 50 best films of the 21st century (so far), from 2000 up until and including 2021

List compiled from: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/best-movies-21st-century

Ranked as in the list (honorable mentions start at #51 and are listed in alphabetical order)

1: Yi Yi
2: Inside Llewyn Davis
3: The Gleaners and I
4: Zodiac
5: Mulholland Drive
6: Spirited Away
7: Brokeback Mountain
8: In the Mood for Love
9: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
10: Get Out
11: Boyhood
12: Moonlight
13: Burning
14: Wall-E
15: The Power of the Dog
16: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
17: Talk to Her
18: Shoplifters
19: Drive My Car
20: Far From Heaven
21: Parasite
22: Before Sunset
23: 35 Shots of Rum
24: Timbuktu
25: Call Me by Your Name
26: Y Tu Mamá También
27: At Berkeley
28: A Serious Man
29: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
30: Marie Antoinette
31: Manchester by the Sea
32: The Return
33: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
34: The Social Network
35: The Favourite
36: Lovers Rock
37: Wendy and Lucy
38: Children of Men
39: I Am Not Your Negro
40: Summer of Soul
41: Pan’s Labyrinth
42: Never Rarely Sometimes Always
43: Grizzly Man
44: Things to Come
45: Bridesmaids
46: Pariah
47: Bright Star
48: Time
49: Black Panther
50: Weekend

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Honorable mentions (listed alphabetically)
51: Caché
52: The Dark Knight
53: L’Enfant
54: Holy Motors
55: The Hurt Locker
56: Margaret
57: Marriage Story
58: The Piano Teacher
59: The Royal Tenenbaums
60: Summer Hours
61: There Will Be Blood
62: Under the Sand
63: Under the Skin
64: Vera Drake
65: Waltz With Bashir

20

https://variety.com/lists/best-movies-of-all-time/

331

A companion list to “Movies Where There Are No Women”
https://trakt.tv/lists/23954198

Films where there are no male characters OR male characters are on screen for less than 15 minutes total OR don’t have names AND/OR significant dialogue.

52

2012 - Movies nominated for most major Oscar categories (Picture, Director, Cinematography, Actor and Actress, Supporting Actor and Actress, Feature Documentary, Animated Feature, Foreign Feature, Score, and Film Editing)

404

Movies about love in Alphabetical Order

3

I well remember being taken to Blazing Saddles at the age of 10, when I was far too young to understand most of the jokes. At the same time, I could see how important Blazing Saddles was to my parents and their friends. They quoted from it for months—years—afterward.

As much as savoring a particular joke, I realize now, they were trying to reclaim that initial, joyful shock to the system. There’s not a film on the WGA’s 101 Funniest Screenplays that doesn’t produce such an unexpected jolt, if not a sustained quake, and for the same reasons Blazing Saddles did—by transgressing accepted norms.

One question that this list asks, however: Should a great comedy simply be gauged by the laughter it elicits? “Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” George S. Kaufman famously quipped. A number of the comedies on this list went under-appreciated at the box office and by critics; years, if not decades, had to pass before the work began to receive its due. This was as true for Buster Keaton’s The General as it was nearly half a century later for Harold and Maude, and 30 years after that for Office Space.

The oldest movie on the list is Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), while the most recent is Bridesmaids, released in 2011. The latter also has the distinction of being written by two women—Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, working in slapstick, a genre historically dominated by men. Bridesmaids comes in at no. 16, immediately after When Harry Met Sally, written by the legendary Nora Ephron. Comedy screenwriting has long been a playground that women and writers of color have not had enough time in. The work of Richard Pryor on Blazing Saddles, Tina Fey on Mean Girls, Amy Heckerling on Clueless, and Hagar Wilde, co-writer of Bringing Up Baby, makes you wonder what a list would be if the playground had been more inclusive all along.

In the end, the variety of films on the list—as different as Being There is to Airplane! or Duck Soup is to Fargo—indicates how difficult it is to gauge a great comedy by any set of particular criteria. Better to say the best comedy writers and comedians are like astronauts, launching themselves beyond the ozone layer of the tasteful and the expected in order to find the forbidden or the outrageous or the merely uncomfortable. Whether that produces an outrageous comedy like Mrs. Doubtfire or a satire like Dr. Strangelove, the goal is still provocation. And truth.

Written by Paul Brownfield
2015-11-15

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