For a Friday with friends, you need a film that doesn't require perfect silence to work. Something engaging enough that it holds attention even in a room with people in it.
Despite everything, the 2020s have produced some genuinely remarkable cinema. Films made under pressure that somehow carry none of it.
Comedy at its best doesn't ask you to laugh. It creates situations so specific and so true that laughter is the only honest response.
After discovering a once-in-a-lifetime player with a rocky past abroad, a down on his luck basketball scout takes it upon himself to bring the phenom to the States without his team's approval. Against the odds, they have one final shot to prove they have what it takes to make it in the NBA.
Working incognito at his rich dad's company to test his own merits, Teto falls for Paula and tells her he grew up poor, a lie that spins out of control.
American expat Mickey Pearson has built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he's looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them - a damaged, brainy troublemaker - and with the school's head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
The now-reformed Bad Guys are trying (very, very hard) to be good, but instead find themselves hijacked into a high-stakes, globe-trotting heist, masterminded by a new team of criminals they never saw coming: The Bad Girls.
What makes great comedy is specificity. The more precise the observation, the more universal the feeling. These films nail that balance.
Marcel is an adorable one-inch-tall shell who ekes out a colorful existence with his grandmother Connie and their pet lint, Alan. Once part of a sprawling community of shells, they now live alone as the sole survivors of a mysterious tragedy. When a documentarian discovers them amongst the clutter of his Airbnb, his resulting short film brings Marcel millions of passionate fans, as well as unprecedented dangers and a new hope at finding his long-lost family.
Brought back to life by an unorthodox scientist, a young woman runs off with a lawyer on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, she grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
In a suburban fantasy world, two teenage elf brothers embark on an extraordinary quest to discover if there is still a little magic left out there.
Four stagnant high school teachers decide to test out a theory that maintaining a constant level of intoxication will improve their overall lives.
Tired of being locked in a reptile house where humans gawk at them like they are monsters, a ragtag group of Australia's deadliest creatures plot an escape from their zoo to the Outback, a place where they'll fit in without being judged.
The best hopeful films aren't naive. They acknowledge the difficulty and find the humanity anyway. These do that.
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.