Great Scots: 'Whiskey Galore!' and 'The Maggie'

Two Scottish comedies from Alexander Mackendrick, Whiskey Galore! and The Maggie, were part of Ealing Studios movies meant for a depressed postwar England to "let off steam".

                                      
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Two Scottish comedies from Alexander Mackendrick, Whiskey Galore! and The Maggie, were part of Ealing Studios movies meant for a depressed postwar England to "let off steam".

A certain species that thrive in English departments and creative writing programs make good fodder for satire in Dana Schwartz's The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon.

If director Riley Stearns sometimes loses his thematic bearings, he never forgets to deliver large, violent doses of comedy in the instant cult classic, The Art of Self-Defense.

As in the America of the 1970s -- with its political corruption, war, economic straits, and fatalism -- Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud resonates loudly in these times. Shall we join the circus freaks dancing on the grave of an absurd and unjust society?

Adjustment Day may not be peak Palahniuk, but it is nonetheless entertaining and twistedly educational, providing abundantly peculiar and original paths within one of his most astute and necessary social commentaries to date.

While Anthony Asquith's Shooting Stars and Underground look excellent on Kino Lorber's digital restoration, Arthur Robison's The Informer, looks most spectacular, thanks to working from the original negative and a tinted nitrate print.

Documentarian Penny Lane challenges you to leave behind your preconceptions and give the Devil his due in this irreverent, entertaining look at the Satanic Temple, Hail Satan?

Let's pretend for a moment that Bret Easton Ellis is capable of such a staggering feat of truth-telling, and read White as if it is indeed a work of nonfiction.

In rendering his most avant-garde characters as members of a kind of self-help conspiracy in The Made-Up Man, Joseph Scapellato offers not an update but a revision of absurdism, and as such, many social phenomena ripe for satire get off easy.

If Shirley Jackson's simple parable, "The Lottery", couldn't inspire self-reflection in an arguably simpler time, one has to wonder what messages today -- such as that of Bojack Horseman's "The Lottery" episode -- are falling on deaf ears in these times of increasing gun violence in America.

Adam McKay's gonzo Dick Cheney biopic satire, Vice, won't be compared to Shakespeare, but it shares the Bard's disinterest in supervillains' motivations.

Winner of the coveted Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award in 2018, Ulster American is primed to contribute to societal narratives while lampooning contemporary injustices.

Not their first foray into bringing the short story form to cinema, the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs affirms, sadly, that in this regard, cinema is the lesser storytelling form.

In the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, there's something altogether new about having revisionist western ideas filtered through their rich sense of character, black comedy, and their penetrating awareness of humanity's fatal imperfections.

The Trump presidency is Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida made real – only it's stripped of the mythology and just lying bare and ugly for all to see.

Diamantino's astounding surrealistic introduction soon unfolds into an ethereal genre-mashup.

Gary Shteyngart's state of the nation satire about a billionaire on the run doesn't tell us much about anything.

Is a "theology of humor" viable?

The personal branding phenomenon is an ongoing crisis of humanity.

Matthew Thurber's Art Comic lampoons the art world by wallowing in its shallowest waters.

The Death of Stalin is rarely out-and-out hilarious, but the performances are top-notch and the writing is thoroughly witty, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

Antoine Laurain's Smoking Kills is provocative and funny, but its meditations remain consistently mature.

Boots Riley announces himself a filmmaker to watch with an explosive racial satire that's as unforgettable as they come.

Curtis White gives a hilarious display of creative destruction.

If you enjoyed 2016's raunchy breakout hit Deadpool, you're almost assured to love its even raunchier sequel.

The blasphemous, unyielding Deadpool 2 doesn't outdo its predecessor, but rather gives more of a good thing.

BBC Two's The Mash Report is funny, and we really need funny these days.

We need to talk about Ministry's anti-war statement, because it encapsulates so much that's so wrong about testosterone-driven masculinist activism.

The college comedy deficit means that we are neither taught how to take a joke nor how to interpret one.

Bill McKibben's novel asks readers to value resistance movements that embrace humor, creativity, and civility while inspiring activism as part of our everyday lives.

First-time directors Boots Riley and Carlos López Estrada tackle racial identity in radically different ways.

There's a ghostly suggestion of Philip Roth's writing voice in Portnoy's Complaint in this novel; a relatively calm voice, this time in the third person, documenting the madness.

The new social satire from normally reliable director Alexander Payne is a well-meaning premise in search of a story.

Peter Mattei's 2013 novel echoes Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, AMC's Mad Men, Ayn Rand's characters, and Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, albeit without the violence.

The Unquotable Trump is a devious, dark, disturbing, brilliant delight that will prove the standard bearer for texts from the resistance.

Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen present a rushed "meal" stuffed with random ingredients and served to a public that's still digesting the appetizer.

The ½ Hour News Hour only lasted one season. Why is it that conservatives appear to have less facility for satire than liberals?