Are we allowed to make jokes about the Holocaust? In this outrageously funny and thought-provoking film, The Last Laugh, filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein puts the question about comedy’s ultimate taboo to legends including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Sarah Silverman, Gilbert Gottfried, Harry Shearer, Alan Zweibel, Jeffrey Ross, Judy Gold, Susie Essman, Larry Charles, and many other critical thinkers, as well as Holocaust survivors themselves. Through these interviews and clips from our favorite standup comedy, TV shows, and movies, The Last Laugh offers fresh insights into the Holocaust, our own psyches, and what else—9/11, AIDS, racism— is or isn’t off-limits in a society that prizes freedom of speech. In the process, The Last Laugh also disproves the idea that there is nothing left to say about the Holocaust, and opens a fresh avenue for approaching this epochal tragedy. Star-studded, provocative and thoroughly entertaining, The Last Laugh dares to ask uncomfortable questions about just how free speech can really be, with unexpected and hilarious results that will leave you both laughing and appreciating the importance of humor even in the face of events that make you want to cry.
Hatched
The Disaster Artist
An aspiring actor in Hollywood meets an enigmatic stranger by the name of Tommy Wiseau and the meeting leads the actor down a path nobody could have predicted; creating the worst movie ever made.
Logan Lucky
The Logans are a hardscrabble family from the hills of West Virginia, and their clan has been famous for its bad luck for nearly 90 years. But the conniving Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) decides its time to turn the family’s luck around, and with a little help from his friends, the Redneck Robbers, he plans to steal $14 million from the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
To Die For
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, Illeana Douglas
Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) is a weather reporter at her small-town cable station, but she dreams of being a big-time news anchor. However, she feels that her middle-class husband (Matt Dillon) is holding her back, so she decides to have him murdered. For this, she enlists Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), a high school boy who is enamored with her. The plan doesn’t work exactly as she intended, though, and her husband’s family starts to suspect that she was involved in his death.
The Little Hours
Medieval nuns Alessandra, Fernanda, and Ginevra lead a simple life in their convent. Their days are spent chafing at monastic routine, spying on one another, and berating the estate’s day laborer. After a particularly vicious insult session drives the peasant away, Father Tommasso brings on new hired hand Massetto, a virile young servant forced into hiding by his angry lord. Introduced to the sisters as a deaf-mute to discourage temptation, Massetto struggles to maintain his cover as the repressed nunnery erupts in a whirlwind of pansexual horniness, substance abuse, and wicked revelry.
Landline
Starring: Jenny Slate, John Turturro, Edie Falco, Abby Quinn and Jay Duplass
Set in Manhattan in 1995, Landline follows three women in one family having lots of sex, drugs, and Japanese food. Navigating monogamy, honesty, and a long-lost New York, the Jacobs family lives in the last days when people still didn’t have cell phones and still did smoke inside. Teenage Ali discovers her dad’s affair, her older sister Dana uncovers her own wild side, and their mother Pat grapples with the truth that she can’t have it all, but her family still has each other. For a generation raised on divorce and wall-to-wall carpeting, LANDLINE is an honest comedy about what happens when sisters become friends and parents become humans.
The Big Lebowski
Starring: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, John Turturro
It may be just, like, our opinion man but the Coen Brother’s The Big Lebowski features cinema’s most loveable loser, Jeffrey Lebowski. Confused with the other Jeffrey Lebowski (the millionaire), his rug gets peed on and that sets off an adventurous chain of events with nihilists, porn producers, writers in iron lungs, and performance artists throughout Los Angeles. But really, man, ‘The Dude’ and his Vietnam-reminiscing partner Walter would much rather be bowling. It’s hard not to just quote the whole movie right here because, let’s face it, we’ve watched it a dozen times and its brilliance only gets better with age. Coitus.
Dude, Where’s My Car?
This is the ultimate pot-smoking movie without anyone actually smoking pot (ok, yes, the dog tokes). Dude Where’s My Car is a severely underrated film we deem a bonafide classic. After two potheads, Jesse and Chester, wake up to find their car missing, they enter into one bizarro world in the land of Los Angeles that includes tracksuits, hot chicks, video games, Zoltan, and, yes, an ostrich. You’re in for the ride of your life with this one. Dude. Sweet.
Band Aid
This raw, real and hilarious debut centers on a couple (director Zoe Lister-Jones and Adam Pally) who can’t stop fighting. In a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, they decide to turn the fights into songs and, with the help of a neighbor (Fred Armisen), start a band. A story of love, loss and rock and roll, BAND AID is a witty, perceptive view of modern romance, with some seriously catchy hooks to boot.
The Blues Brothers
Starring: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Carrie Fisher, Aretha Franklin, John Candy
Direct out of jail, Jake Blues and his Brother Elwood are off on a “mission from God” to raise funds for the orphanage in which they grew up. The only thing they can do is do what they do best: play music. So they get their old band together and they’re on their way yet not without getting in a bit of trouble here and there.
