The best films for a group don't flatten the experience - they create one. You want something that generates opinions, debates, a reason to stay up later than planned.
In retrospect, the 2010s were a decade of quiet excellence - films doing serious work without demanding credit for it.
Great comedy is harder than drama. The timing has to be precise, the characters have to be real, and the laughs have to be earned rather than demanded.
Super spy Lance Sterling and scientist Walter Beckett are almost exact opposites. Lance is smooth, suave and debonair. Walter is... not. But what Walter lacks in social skills he makes up for in smarts and invention, creating the awesome gadgets Lance uses on his epic missions. But when events take an unexpected turn, Walter and Lance suddenly have to rely on each other in a whole new way.
Vampire housemates try to cope with the complexities of modern life and show a newly turned hipster some of the perks of being undead.
Greg is coasting through senior year of high school as anonymously as possible, avoiding social interactions like the plague while secretly making spirited, bizarre films with Earl, his only friend. But both his anonymity and friendship threaten to unravel when his mother forces him to befriend a classmate with leukemia.
The comedic modern-day quintet takes on their 2003 counterparts when villains from each of their worlds join forces to pit the two Titan teams against each other. They'll need to set aside their differences and work together to combat Trigon, Hexagon, Santa Claus (that's right, Santa!) and time itself in order to save the multiverse.
While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.
These films earn their laughs honestly. Nothing is cheap, nothing is mean-spirited, nothing is there just to get a reaction. It's all earned.
A disgraced basketball coach is given the chance to coach Los Amigos, a team of players who are intellectually disabled, and soon realizes they just might have what it takes to make it to the national championships.
An Iranian family survives the shah and the ayatollah and moves to France. This story follows the family through it all. Despite the politics, revolution, prison, beatings, assassinations and suicides this is a comedy.
When Pete and Ellie decide to start a family, they stumble into the world of foster care adoption. They hope to take in one small child but when they meet three siblings, including a rebellious 15 year old girl, they find themselves speeding from zero to three kids overnight.
Colorado Springs, late 1970s. Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer, and Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish colleague, run an undercover operation to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
England, early 18th century. The close relationship between Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill is threatened by the arrival of Sarah's cousin, Abigail Hill, resulting in a bitter rivalry between the two cousins to be the Queen's favourite.
Overlooked films are overlooked for the wrong reasons. Not because they failed - because they didn't fit. These didn't fit. They're excellent.
A great comedy earns its place in memory not through jokes but through character. The funniest moments are the ones that are also somehow true.