Recent comedies: a billion-point arcade record and a hometown film

A comedy is a film built to make you laugh, and the form is as old as the movies themselves. Mack Sennett, a producer often called the father of slapstick, formed the Keystone studio in 1912 and built silent comedy on chases and pratfalls. Charlie Chaplin learned filmmaking there. A Chicago Sun-Times profile says nobody did more for the chase than Sennett, and that Chaplin learned the techniques of filmmaking at Keystone.

That tradition never left. Slapstick is named for a flat double paddle that makes a loud noise but causes little pain, and it still runs through romantic comedies and animation. The recent films below are gentler and smaller, made in Iowa, Greece, Siberia, the Lofoten islands and Puerto Rico, and two were made on small budgets. One, Man vs Snake, is a documentary that Relay lists with the comedies. Relay lists 33 comedies from 2015 onward that passed review. These are the ones with a story worth knowing before you press play.

What makes a comedy worth your evening

• Low stakes, played seriously. A video game score or a hike to see a friend can matter more than a bank heist.
• People you would want to spend time with. Most of these are about ordinary people deciding what to do next.
• A story behind the camera. Small budgets and hometown casts give these films a warmth that big studios rarely copy.

Recent comedies to watch

Man vs Snake (2015)

In 1984 Tim McVey played the arcade game Nibbler for nearly 45 hours at the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa. He finished on 1,000,042,270 points, and Guinness World Records lists him as the first person to score a billion points on a video game. Guinness says the mayor of Ottumwa named 28 January 1984 "Tim McVey Day".

The directors Andrew Seklir and Tim Kinzy were editors on the television series Battlestar Galactica when they found the game while playing arcade machines in their office break room. Post Magazine called the film five years in the making, and it premiered on 27 September 2015 at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. It is a documentary, so the story is true. It follows McVey as he tries to win the record back after online rumours credited an Italian player, Enrico Zanetti, with a higher score. The stakes are a video game score, and the film treats them with complete seriousness, which is where much of the fun comes from.

Documentary

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Bros. (2017)

Don Tjernagel, a local comedian from Oelwein, Iowa, wrote and directed Bros. with a local cast and crew. Its press release says it was made for only $5,000 and shot in Waterloo, Iowa. The release says a Los Angeles investor offered $100,000 to make it somewhere else, while a local news report put the offer at four times the budget. Tjernagel stayed either way, saying the local actors look just as good as anyone in a Hollywood movie.

Tanner Bollinger and Matt Lee Ingebritson, both of Waterloo, play two men in their late 20s, and Tanner has to decide whether to take a job in Chicago or stay in his hometown. Production began in May 2017, and the crew used downtown parking ramps and local spots such as Brown Bottle and Newton's Cafe. The film premiered on 8 November 2017 at Marcus Theatres Crossroads in Waterloo.

Comedy

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Chick Fight (2020)

Anna, played by Malin Akerman, who also produced the film, is pulled into an underground all-female fight club to turn her life around. Alec Baldwin plays Jack Murphy, a washed-up boxer who trains her for a bout against Bella Thorne's character, Olivia. Akerman called it an outright comedy and "a comedic version of Rocky" in an interview with Metro.

Paul Leyden directed from an original script by Joseph Downey, a first-time feature writer. It was shot in 18 days in Puerto Rico at the start of 2020, and Akerman said there was no money for trainers months in advance, so she kept up her own boxing classes. Quiver Distribution and Redbox Entertainment released it on 13 November 2020. Variety's Jessica Kiang found it formulaic, while Akerman said women have long been told that fighting is not lady-like and that the fighters in the film find a sisterhood.

Action/Adventure

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Ice (2018)

Ice (Led in Russian) opened in Russia on 14 February 2018, Valentine's Day. It follows Nadya, a figure skater who nearly gave up skating after an injury, and Sasha, a hockey player who helps her believe again. The producers' studio says it entered the list of the top ten highest-grossing Russian films of all time, with more than 1.5 billion rubles, about $26 million, at the box office. Kinobusiness lists its budget at 150 million rubles.

Aglaya Tarasova, Alexander Petrov and Milos Bikovich had barely skated before and trained intensively for two months. Komsomolskaya Pravda in Irkutsk reports that part of the film was shot at Lake Baikal in Siberia, with minor roles going to local residents. The sequel Ice 3 opened on 14 February 2024 and took about $20.6 million worldwide, according to Kinoafisha.

Drama

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The Sunlit Night (2019)

Frances, played by Jenny Slate, is a New York painter who takes a job in Norway as an assistant to Nils, a grumpy painter, on a project to paint a rural barn. The film was shot in the Lofoten archipelago, about 160 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, the land of the midnight sun. It is adapted from Rebecca Dinerstein's 2015 novel, and Dinerstein, who now publishes as Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, wrote the screenplay.

Slate also co-produced, and Zach Galifianakis and Gillian Anderson are in the cast. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019, ran nearly two hours there and was cut to 82 minutes for release on video on demand on 17 July 2020. Critics were split. Kirkus reviewer David Rapp wrote that the film is much better than the novel, while Time called it three-quarters of a movie and praised Slate.

Romance

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Bourek (2015)

Bourek is set on the fictional Greek island of Khronos, where an international group of characters hide from the end of the world and are brought together by food and a pastry called bourek. The Athens International Film Festival places it at a seaside tavern whose owner tries to keep the business going despite her brother's opposition, with guests that include a wealthy American, a British DJ with memory lapses and a Turkish merchant.

Vladan Nikolic, a Serbian filmmaker and associate professor of media studies at The New School in New York, wrote, directed and edited it. It is his fifth feature. The cast includes actors from the United States, England, Greece, Serbia, Cyprus, Iran and Japan. The Athens festival, which screened it on 29 September 2015, called it one of the most affectionate and optimistic films of the festival. It opened at Cinema Village in Manhattan on 29 April 2016.

Comedy

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Birthmarked (2018)

Toni Collette and Matthew Goode play two scientists who leave their careers to raise three children as a nature versus nurture experiment. They hope for a genius, an artist and a pacifist, and years later the children turn out average. The film is set in the 1980s, mostly at a family cottage in Vermont, and the children are homeschooled.

Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, a Canadian filmmaker whose first feature was Whitewash, directed from a script by Marc Tulin. Fionnula Flanagan, Michael Smiley and Andreas Apergis, who plays a cold-showering Russian research assistant, complete the cast. It opened in select US theatres on 30 March 2018. The Globe and Mail critic Brad Wheeler gave it 2.5 out of 4 stars and called its 88 minutes mildly interesting.

Comedy

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Where to go next

• Recent dark comedies from Spain, Denmark, Finland and more
• Cult classic movies that found their audience years late