Comedy

This 1993 international hit by Ang Lee is a funny and poignant story of a gay, Taiwanese-American man who goes to some lengths to fool his visiting family that he's actually straight. The results are far more complicated and entertaining than anyone could have guessed. The film seems all the more rich now since Lee has become a major Hollywood director: that same sensitivity and mild bemusement he brought to such stories of manners as Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm in recent years are in full bloom in this earlier work.

As she does in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Janeane Garofalo proves she's a capable leading lady--beautiful, charming, self-effacing, and what used to be referred to as sharp as a tack. Garofalo plays Marcy, aide to dim Massachusetts senator McGlory (Jay O. Sanders). Denis Leary is appropriately slimy as a fellow aide. The senator and Nick dispatch Marcy to the remote (and fictitious) Irish town of Ballinagra, where she's supposed to unearth relatives to use in the senator's PR campaign.

Bobby Fine (Ryan O'Neal) teaches comparative literature at a New England university. His father Jack (Jack Warden) is a hard-luck 7th-Avenue dress merchant in heavy debt to a 7-foot loan shark (Richard Kiel). To pay up, Jack gives up the business - and babe-in-the-woods Bobby finds himself part of the deal. Exposed to the craziest business in midtown, Bobby's solution is the next best thing to indecent exposure: debuting a line of see-through jeans! Soon he's in full tryst with the loan shark's wife (Mariangela Melato) - and the next garment he dons might be a cement overcoat.

The low-key, charming Outsourced is a thoughtful satire about the human side of contemporary frustrations associated with the global economy. Josh Hamilton (The House of Yes) stars as Todd Anderson, vice president of customer relations for a Seattle company that sells phone-order, patriotic kitsch. Part of Todd's job is keeping his operators' order-taking time down to a few minutes. He's good at what he does, but that doesn't stop the company from outsourcing Todd's entire department to somewhere in India, where local workers can field customer calls more cheaply.

Leatherheads is a sort of two-fisted homage, simultaneously celebrating the early, unstructured days of professional football and the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s. George Clooney stars as "Dodge" Connelly of the Duluth Bulldogs, a wily (if a bit long in the tooth) player whose team goes bankrupt. His solution is to lure a war hero and star of the college-football circuit, Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford (John Krasinski from the American version of The Office) to join the team and, through the sheer force of his celebrity, legitimize professional football.

A romantic comedy that begins with a discussion about sex education and ends with a bit of an unexpected twist, Definitely, Maybe focuses on an engaging father and his 10-year-old daughter. She is curious about the women her dad loved prior to marrying (and separating from) her mother. Instead of telling her, "None of your business," he decides to tell her about them... Sort of. Will is played by Ryan Reynolds and his precocious daughter Maya is adroitly portrayed by Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine).

Director-writer David S. Ward’s 1982 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (with material from another Steinbeck tale, Sweet Thursday) has its charms, principally some top-drawer talent on both sides of the camera; the cast is headed by Nick Nolte and Debra Winger, Jack Nitzsche composed the music, and John Huston supplies the voice-over.

Though it doesn't hit the same comic heights as Bowfinger, Death at a Funeral is a fun little romp. Granted, not all of the characters are meant to be humorous, like Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen, Pride & Prejudice) and his wife, Jane (Keeley Hawes, Tristram Shandy), straight-faced foils for the more over-the-top performers. After Daniel's father passes away, the couple offers to host the funeral, so all his relatives descend on the family abode, including Daniel's estranged brother, Robert (Rupert Graves, V for Vendetta).

After the dark brilliance of No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading may seem like a trifle, but few filmmakers elevate the trivial to art quite like Joel and Ethan Coen. Inspired by Stansfield Turner's Burn Before Reading, the comically convoluted plot clicks into gear when the CIA gives analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) the boot. Little does Cox know his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton, riffing on her Michael Clayton character), is seeing married federal marshal Harry (George Clooney, Swinton's Clayton co-star, playing off his Syriana role).

Screen legend Tony Curtis leads an all-star international cast in this hilarious, romantic and action-packed romp! Set in glorious Monte Carlo, this hugely entertaining follow-up to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines follows the dashing Schofield (Curtis) as he teams up with the scheming Sir Cuthbert Ware-Armitage (Terry-Thomas) in a zany, winner-take-all car rally beset with scheming competitors, treacherous cliffs - and a very beguiling blonde (Susan Hampshire.)