Tis the Season To Be Jolly For Holiday Comedies
Enjoy the gift of laughter with these funny films.
Get into the spirit of the season this year with some fun and funny films that connect to the holidays. From an award-winning tale about surviving the season to a black comedy about trying to get away with it, each film offers a unique take on what makes this the most wonderful time of the year.
Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers
The Holdovers
The Holdovers—directed by Alexander Payne and written by David Hemingson—has “the makings of a new holiday classic,” writes ABC News. When three very different people—a curmudgeonly classics teacher (Paul Giamatti), a troublemaking student (Dominic Sessa), and a cook whose son recently died in the Vietnam War (Da’Vine Joy Randolph in an Oscar®-winning performance)—are forced to spend the holiday recess in a nearly empty New England prep school, they bond in a way that changes all of their lives. Nominated for five Academy Awards®, The Holdovers provides a “poignant reminder that no man is a failure who has friends,” notes Entertainment Weekly. “When it’s over, the chill it leaves in your spine is destined to last nearly as long as the smile on your face,” the Observer writes.
The official trailer for The Holdovers
Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in In Bruges
In Bruges
Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges follows two hitmen—Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson)—sent by their crime boss (Ralph Fiennes) to the picturesque Belgium town during the holiday season. As they wander through the city’s festive medieval streets and scenic canals, neither knows what is the real reason for being stuck in this medieval town. With twinkling lights, bustling streets, and overbooked hotels, “a certain holiday magic enlivens” the film, writes Collider. In fact, Epigram lists it as one of their five best alternative Christmas films. While there is not a Santa, a reindeer, or an elf to be seen, the National Post argues, “It’s a twilight fairy tale of holiday purgatory in which there still exists hope for the otherwise hopeless.”
The official trailer for In Bruges
Ben Aldridge and Jim Parsons in Spoiler Alert
Spoiler Alert
In Michael Showalter’s Spoiler Alert, Michael Ausiello (Jim Parsons) and Kit Cowan (Ben Aldridge) chronicle their over-13-year romance with the Christmas card photos they send out each year to their friends and family. Beneath the funny snapshots, however, is the complex, comic, and finally heartbreaking reality of a long-term relationship. Based on Ausiello’s memoir, the story captures the way that the two men are changed by hardship and difficulties into a family they can count on. Co-starring Sally Field and Bill Irwin, the film “is a true-to-life celebration of the subtleties that make the holiday season, and life in its entirety, so incredibly difficult and beautiful at the same time,” writes The Daily Beast.
Spoiler Alert "Merry Christmas" Clip
Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack in The Ice Harvest
The Ice Harvest
After taking on a lesser-known holiday with Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis takes on the holiday season with The Ice Harvest, a black comedy about trying to get through Christmas Eve alive. Ramis told The Daily News, “I said to my agent, ‘I think it’s time for a dark, existential, funny film noir. Let’s find one!’” While everyone else in Wichita, Kansas, is getting ready for Santa, a crooked lawyer (John Cusack) and a local pornographer (Billy Bob Thornton) try to skip town with the $2 million they’ve skimmed from the mob. When an ice storm closes the highway down, they hole up in a strip club where things get really festive. Roger Ebert wrote, “I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly complicated ways to die.”