“Everything Hulot does is elaborately and unnecessarily complicated, which means every moment is ripe for comedy.”

Before his sweet Amelie, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (and co-director Marc Caro) made this surreal black comedy about a post-apocalyptic butcher who has had to improvise in order to stay in business. Yes, I mean cannibalism. Despite the bleak subject matter, Delicatessen is stuffed with magical, life-affirming moments – the movie drips with blood and irony.

Harvard Man opens on the image of a nude sculpture by Auguste Rodin, and writer-director James Toback seems to think he’s offering up a similar convergence of art and eroticism. Instead, this talky and supremely silly morality tale about a Harvard basketball player (Adrian Grenier) who gets caught up in web of drugs, sex and

Before it succumbs to schmaltz, this well-meaning comedy from Chinese director Zhang Yimou works as a nice fable about a con man who can’t help but do good. Zhao Benshan stars as an aging bachelor whose desperate desire to marry leads him to a variety of George Costanza-like schemes, including a claim to be the

This should serve as the definitive litmus test for your tolerance of Williams’ manic style. If you can’t take him here, chance are you won’t be able to take him anywhere. The story makes for a nice match with the comedian’s motormouth sensibility. Williams plays Adrian Cronauer, an Air Force deejay who is transferred to