Fun, light popcorn fare is extremely popular, and it would be easy to make a list of everyone’s favorite box office titans: Star Wars, Jaws, The Avengers, When Harry Met Sally, Ghostbusters. But you know all those films already! So here is a list of some great dramas that will resonate through the ages. No matter your sense of humour - silly or sophisticated, light or dark, surreal or broad - you’ll find it represented here.
1. Meet the Parents (2000)
Meeting your partner’s parents is bound to be stressful – but Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) has it worse than most. Turns out his potential father in law (Robert De Niro) is a former CIA agent with a suspicious nature – and a polygraph lie-detector machine at his disposal. Over the course of an eventful visit, Focker’s misfortune builds to a farcical crescendo as his intended (Teri Polo) looks on. Stiller is on hilarious, hapless form and De Niro has never been funnier.
2. Mean Girls (2004)
When Cady (Lindsay Lohan) moves from being home-schooled by her parents in Africa to an American high school, she has rude awakening. Confronted by the school's hierarchy where popularity means everything, she finds herself infiltrating the girl clique The Plastics. Loaded with laugh-out-loud moments, the script, penned by Tina Fey, is filled with zingers. It's a film that provides genuine insight and empathy as well as a hefty dose of putdowns and comeuppances.
3. Hot Fuzz (2007)
Edgar Wright’s follow-up to Shaun of the Dead is a bigger, busier, slightly less focused ramble through small-town cop-movie clichés, but it might just be the better film, benefiting from a script packed with smart one-liners and neat riffs on everything from Hammer horror to cosy ITV dramas. It also, lest we forget, sports arguably the finest supporting cast ever assembled, with (very deep breath) Paddy Considine, Jim Broadbent, Billie Whitelaw, Martin Freeman, Olivia Colman, Edward Woodward, Bill Nighy, Timothy Dalton, The Actor Kevin Eldon, both Adam and Joe, Rory ‘The Hound’ McCann and even a masked Cate Blanchett all getting in on the action.
4. The Trip (2011)
Here’s what happens in The Trip: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing fictionalised versions of themselves, drive across the English countryside, eating fancy meals, bickering about their careers, singing ABBA and doing a lot of celebrity impressions. That’s literally the whole thing – and that’s all it needs to be. Trimmed to film length from a six-episode BBC television series, it’s arranged by director Michael Winterbottom as a series of vignettes that all play out more or less the same way, and yet it’s hysterical. Explaining why is difficult: it’s a road movie that quickly succumbs to travel delirium, that point in a long excursion where boredom, exhaustion and annoyance combine into a sort of euphoria, and things become funny for no reason at all. But Coogan and Brydon have the kind of comic chemistry where that concept can sustain itself across three, almost equally funny films. Make this your starter.
5. School of Rock (2003)
Jack Black is at his most endearing in this underdog story about a struggling musician who poses as a substituted teacher and ends up coaching a class if misfits to compete in a Battle of the Bands. Sure, it echoes Sister Act 2, but Richard Linklater's film pretty much defines the term 'ebullient'. It sails on a wave of pin-shap one-liners, constant heavy riffage and plucky performances from the young cast.
