The most remarkable home-video company that consistently churns out the most important and significant motion pictures in cinema history is the Criterion Collection. For many years, Criterion has been releasing some of the best movies on laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray, where each film is picked for a variety of reasons to show the world, including award-winning films like Parasite and even highly comedic movies such as It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Comedies are one of the most difficult genres to tackle, relying on perfect timing, delivery, story, and acting to pull off uproarious laughter. The Criterion Collection has chosen some 133 films thus far to be a part of their inner circle over the years. Here are the 10 best comedy movies in the Criterion Collection, ranked.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
One of the all-time great high school movies is The Breakfast Club from filmmaker John Hughes. After the success of Sixteen Candles and National Lampoon's Vacation, Hughes was becoming the top director in Hollywood, and with The Breakfast Club, he became a household name as did the actors who were dubbed the Brat Pack.
The film takes place during the course of one Saturday, where five kids have to serve detention in the school library. An eclectic lunch of sushi, pixie sticks, and a never-ending lunch bag of sandwiches, along with a dance sequence, getting high, and spilling a bag of problems from home on the couch is enough to make everyone laugh. Hughes took it a step further and added a wonderful note of sincerity and drama to balance out a real-life teenager's life.
The Great Dictator (1940)
Most all of Charlie Chaplin's comedy films can be listed here, but The Great Dictator proves itself to be at the top of the list for many reasons. Chaplin wrote, produced, scored, directed, and starred in two roles in this movie and was also his first film to include audio. Chaplin was such a wonderful actor who had some of the best comedic timing on the planet.
This film followed a fictional account of WWII, specifically the holocaust, here Chaplin himself played a goofy version of Hitler and of a poor Jewish barber with amnesia who tries to fight the nazi regime. There are so many funny moments throughout, that there are enough jokes for two full films, including a dispute with a nation called Bacteria, which is a milestone in filmmaking given the sobering subject matter.
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze teamed up to make the incredibly weird film Being John Malkovich, which is of the greatest comedies of all time while being one of the strangest films of Earth. The film centers on a middle-aged man who gets a job at a gloomy office on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a skyscraper where he discovers a portal that sends him inside the mind of actor John Malkovich for about fifteen minutes before being thrown out under the New Jersey turnpike.
Charlie Sheen, a manic and frazzled Cameron Diaz, and an Inception-like sequence with dozens of John Malkovich's talking with each other are only a couple of the funnier scenes in this film.
Repo Man (1984)
Director Alex Cox took the world by storm with his first feature film Repo Man, which is one of the craziest, funniest, and most entertaining movies ever made. This film is thrown in from the outfield that follows a vehicle repossession man played by Harry Dean Stanton who recruits a punk rocker played by Emilio Estevez as the two cross paths with a strange car that might have ties to alien life and outer space.
With all of the wacky characters, punk rock songs, and its subtle message of consumerism, Repo Man still stands the test of time as one of the all-time great comedies.
Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love The Bomb (1964)
Leave it to Stanley Kubrick to make one of the funniest films ever made with Dr. Strangelove, that starred Peter Sellers in multiple roles, George C. Scott, Slim Pickens, and a young James Earl Jones, pre-Star Wars.
This hilarious comedy satire on the Cold War and the nuclear arms race with America and Russia is simply phenomenal as the top brass in the American military and a wheelchair-bound nuclear expert and former Nazi try and decide the best course of action to blow up the world. It's funny from start to finish, including Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb to detonation.
Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas (1998)
Criterion headed into bat country with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from esteemed film director Terry Gilliam that was based on Hunter S. Thompson's book about traveling to Las Vegas with his friend to cover a motorcycle race.
With Johnny Depp's intimate and hilarious portrayal of the drug-fueled adventure through hotels, bars, and coming face to face with dinosaurs and hitchhikers that played Spider-Man, this film captures the essence of the legendary writer and the genius that flowed through him on a daily basis.
Dazed & Confused (1993)
Richard Linklater rose to superstardom after this hilarious comedy hit Dazed and Confused hit theaters with a virtually unknown cast at the time, who all have gone on to be A-List actors. This funny and important movie tells the tale over the course of the last day of High School in a small Texas town in 1976, where the upcoming seniors haze and welcome in the new batch of freshmen with booze, drugs, and a party at the moon tower.
New relationships, fights, jokes, and driving around perfectly captures what life was and is still like in these rural towns in America. Plus, nothing is better than seeing Ben Affleck lose his cool after a freshman spills paint on him. In the words of Matthew McConaughey, "Alright, alright, alright."
Rushmore (1998)
Like every Charlie Chaplin movie could be in this list - each and every Wes Anderson film could be added here as well. Rushmore is at the peak though as it is the funniest film Wes Anderson has made yet.
A great cast led by a young Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray, the story features a young man in prep school who is involved in every single activity but isn't actually good at any of it besides adapting big-budget movies into stage plays. This young student falls in love with a teacher and goes to war with Bill Murray, cementing this film into the comedy hall-of-fame.
Election (1999)
The amazing filmmaker Alexander Payne landed this adaptation to the big screen and made what is perhaps the best movie about politics and an election that is ripe with big laughs and hilarious dialogue.
The film centers on a high school student council election between an over-achiever named Tracy (Reese Witherspoon) and a popular, naive, kind jock named Paul Metzler, and you betzler that the comedy comes rolling in from start to finish as their teacher (portrayed by Matthew Broderick) tries to throw the titular election once he finds out something peculiar about Tracy.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Christopher Guest, the king of the mockumentary, started out with Rob Reiner and made this faux-documentary about the aging members of the iconic rock band Spinal Tap. With enough jokes and one-liners to last three films, the camera crew documents the lives of each member of the band and their many drummers as they still try and succeed in rock n' roll.
The original music is fantastic and comical as are the situations this band puts themselves in, which has inspired numerous spinoffs and imitations, none of which hold a candle to this film This Is Spinal Tap.