comedies

In Wellington, wallflower Lily is inexplicably attracted to loser Jarrod. She's out of a job; he's nursing a decade-long grudge against someone who teased him in high school. When she accompanies him to his seacoast hometown where he intends to take on his nemesis, she meets his father, his daughter from a one-night stand, and other family members--plus the memory of his talented, dead brother. Jarrod treats Lily badly, invents a relationship with his dead brother's fiancée, and gears up for his fight. Will she finally have enough and go home?

When Steve Coogan is asked by The Observer to tour the country's finest restaurants, he envisions it as the perfect getaway with his beautiful girlfriend. But, when she backs out on him, he has no one to accompany him but his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon.

Stephen has agoraphobia and, in the flat he won't leave, meticulously labels and stores everything from nail clippings to urine. In long flashbacks we see a trip to the continent he took with his only friend Bunny, an outgoing, inveterate gambler. The European trip is a bit dull (Stephen wants to visit every museum imaginable) until one night in Poland they meet Eloisa, a Spanish waitress, and offer to drive her home for her city's fiesta. We can guess that the trip won't end well - because Stephen is now stuck in his flat with occasional visits from Bunny - but will anything in the reverie move Stephen to action?

Dennis Dimbleby Bagley is a brilliant young advertising executive who can't come up with a slogan to sell a revolutionary new pimple cream. His obsessive worrying affects not only his relationship with his wife, his friends and his boss, but also his own body - graphically demonstrated when he grows a large stress-related boil on his shoulder. But when the boil grows eyes and a mouth and starts talking, Bagley really begins to think he's lost his mind. But has he?

London, 1969 - two 'resting' (unemployed and unemployable) actors, Withnail and Marwood, fed up with damp, cold, piles of washing-up, mad drug dealers and psychotic Irishmen, decide to leave their squalid Camden flat for an idyllic holiday in the countryside, courtesy of Withnail's uncle Monty's country cottage. But when they get there, it rains non-stop, there's no food, and their basic survival skills turn out to be somewhat limited. Matters are not helped by the arrival of Uncle Monty, who shows an uncomfortably keen interest in Marwood...

Manchester 1976: Cambridge educated Tony Wilson, Granada TV presenter, is at a Sex Pistols gig. Totally inspired by this pivotal moment in music history, he and his friends set up a record label, Factory Records, signing first Joy Division (who go on to become New Order) then James and the Happy Mondays, who all become seminal artists of their time. What ensues is a tale of music, sex, drugs, larger-than-life characters, and the birth of one of the most famous dance clubs in the world, The Hacienda - a mecca for clubbers as famous as the likes of Studio 54. Graphically depicting the music and dance heritage of Manchester from the late 70's to the early 90's, this comedy documents the vibrancy that made Mad-chester the place in the world that you would most like to be.

Two actors, as their make up is applied, talk about the size of their parts. Then into the film: Laurence Sterne's unfilmable novel, Tristram Shandy, a fictive autobiography wherein the narrator, interrupted constantly, takes the entire story to be born. The film tracks between "Shandy" and behind the scenes. Size matters: parts, egos, shoes, noses. The lead's girlfriend, with their infant son, is up from London for the night, wanting sex; interruptions are constant. Scenes are shot, re-shot, and discarded. The purpose of the project is elusive. Fathers and sons; men and women; cocks and bulls. Life is amorphous, too full and too rich to be captured in one narrative.

Two untalented singers are mistaken for a pair of major league safe crackers in Providence, Rhode Island. The two are pressed into service by the local hoodlums and quickly find themselves in conflict with their professional colleagues. Romantic interest is added by the daughter of the underworld leader who won't date the men she knows are gangsters.

In a typical English working-class town, the juveniles have nothing more to do than hang around in gangs. One day, Alan Darcy, a highly motivated man with the same kind of youth experience, starts trying to get the young people off the street and into doing something they can believe in: Boxing. Soon he opens a training facility which is accepted gratefully by them and the gangs start to grow together into friends. Darcy manages to organize a public fight for them to prove what they have learned. A training camp with hiking tours into the mountains of Wales forge the group into a tight-knit club society. With the day of the fight drawing closer, the young boxers get more and more excited.

Four Lions tells the story of a group of British jihadists who push their abstract dreams of glory to the breaking point. As the wheels fly off, and their competing ideologies clash, what emerges is an emotionally engaging (and entirely plausible) farce. In a storm of razor-sharp verbal jousting and large-scale set pieces, Four Lions is a comic tour de force; it shows that-while terrorism is about ideology-it can also be about idiots.

Benjamin, home-schooled by his eccentric mother, is a loner whose passion for writing leads him on an journey as his story first gets ripped off by the legendary fantasy novelist, Ronald Chevalier, and then is adapted into a disastrous movie by the small town's most prolific homespun filmmaker.

An improvised comedy, shot over five days by Shane Meadows, devised with and starring Paddy Considine. Rock roadie and failed musician, Le Donk has lived, loved and learned. Along the way he's lost a girlfriend but he has found a new sidekick in up-and-coming rap prodigy Scor-zay-zee. With Meadows' fly-on-the-wall crew in tow, Donk sets out to make Scor-zay-zee a star...with a little help from the Arctic Monkeys... This low-budget rockumentary follows Le Donk and Scorz on their journey of a lifetime; it's an unpredictable, irrepressible ode to spontaneous filmmaking - and to a burgeoning UK rap talent

Dennis is a clueless and slightly overweight guy, who left his pregnant fiancée five years earlier. Every day, Dennis tries to persuade the woman he loves to accept him back into his life, but everyday he fails. When he discovers that Libby has found a partner in the form of American Whit, frustration grows, and Dennis vows, that for once in his life, he will finish something. This something ends up being a Nike River-run in London. With his friends Gordon and Mr. Ghoshdashtidar by his side, Dennis begins training for the marathon he must finish.

Funny, musical and occasionally dramatic, this is the story of tumultuous rise and fall of a Dublin Soul band, The Commitments. Managed by Jimmy Rabbitte, an unemployed wheeler and dealer with a vision to create "The Worlds Hardest Working Band".

Intermission is an urban love story about people adrift and their convoluted journeys in the search for some kind of love. When the desperately insecure and emotionally inarticulate John breaks up with Deirdre to 'give her a little test' his plan backfires leaving her broken-hearted and him alone and miserable. Through chance and coincidence, their break-up triggers a roller coaster ride of interweaving escapades in the lives of everyone around them. Intermission presents a slice of life, the passage between breaking up and making up, exploring how our lives intersect, and the power we all possess to affect the lives of those around us.

Mark is a wannabe actor, penniless, clueless, and inept. He cares for a brother who's paraplegic, and he has a girlfriend, Sally, who wants out of the relationship. His idea of life is to go to the occasional audition, dodge his landlord (having spent the rent money Sally gave him), give Sally a hang-dog look, and talk with Pearce, who lives upstairs. Mark's flat is in disrepair: the kitchen window slams shut, bits of plaster fall from the ceiling, a bulb fizzes, and the sitting-room chandelier sways. When an awful accident happens, Mark freezes, which precipitates additional accidents; he finally calls Pearce, perhaps the worst decision possible. Will Mark come to his senses?

It's 1973 in Cemetery Junction, a Reading suburb. Three working class lads, best friends, are coming of age. Freddie wants to rise above his station, taking a job selling life insurance, wearing a suit and tie. Snork works at the railway station and wants a girlfriend some day. Bruce talks of leaving but seems on track to work at a factory, drink and fight, and become like his dad, in front of the telly with beer on hand; and he's trying the patience of the police officer who gets him out of jams. Freddie's job leads the lads toward a few small changes. He runs across a childhood friend, Julie, his boss's daughter who's engaged to the firm's top seller. Can the lads break out?

Coopers' Camera is a hilarious comedy set in 1985 suburbia, when a dysfunctional family's Christmas disintegrates into madness once an estranged uncle shows up for the holiday; told primarily through the eyes of younger Cooper son Teddy and the family's Christmas present: a second-hand VHS camcorder.