Subgenre Sampler

Show: All FilmsRental Rental DVD Rental Blu-Ray Rental VHSSales Sales DVD Sales Blu-Ray Sales VHS

It Must Be Heaven (2019): Dir. Elia Suleiman
Feat. Elia Suleiman, Tarik Kopty, Kareem Ghneim…; Brilliantly absurdist comedy of errors following a Palestinian filmmaker who leaves his country for the West and the promise of a new and better…
Parasite (2019): Dir. Joon-ho Bong
Feat. Kang-ho Song, Sun-kyun Lee, Yeo-jeong Cho…; An unemployed family with a bleak future systematically ingratiate themselves into the lives of a wealthy family in this brilliant,…
Donbass (2018): Dir. Sergey Loznitsa
Feat. Tamara Yatsenko, Irina Zayarmiuk, Grigory Masliuk; A 13–part exploration of the conflict between Ukraine and the Russian–supported Donetsk People's Republic throughout the…
Square, The (2017): Dir. Ruben Östlund
Feat. Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West; A smart and ambitious art world satire from the director of FORCE MAJEURE set in and around a cutting–edge contemporary art museum, where a…
Rams (2016): Dir. Grimur Hakonarson
Feat. Sigurour Sigurjonsson, Theodor Juliusson; Distinctively woolly Nordic tale of two estranged sheep–farming brothers as they attempt to save their flocks from pending eradication in a…
Toni Erdmann (2016): Dir. Maren Ade
Feat. Peter Simonischek, Sandra Huller, Ingrid Bisu; Brilliant, unclassifiable German comedy where a stern, career–focused woman is followed around a series of mundane board meetings and vapid…
Force Majeure (Turist) (2014): Dir. Ruben Östlund
Feat. Johannes Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Kristofer Hivju…; A barbed and incisive Swedish black comedy of gender politics, centred around a family on a skiing holiday in the French Alps who face a recognizable…
In Order of Disappearance (2014): Dir. Hans Petter Moland
Feat. Stellan Skarsgard, Bruno Ganz, Pål Sverre Hagen…; Stellan Skarsgård reunites with the director of ZERO KELVIN and A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN for this blackly comic Nordic noir. He plays a somewhat…
Mafia Kills Only in Summer, The (2014): Dir. Pierfrancesco Diliberto
Feat. Cristiana Capotondi, Pierfrancesco Diliberto, Alex Bisconti…; Italian black comedy set in Palermo follows a young boy from childhood to maturity, and examines the pervasive influence the Cosa Nostra holds over…
Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, A (2014): Dir. Roy Andersson
Feat. Holger Andersson, Nils Westblom; Absurdist comedy that follows two hapless novelty salesman on a picaresque tour of the human condition.
Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes) (2014): Dir. Damian Szifron
Feat. Ricardo Darín, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Darío Grandinetti; Exhilarating anthology film combining six tales of revenge provides an ambitious smorgasbord of thrills, spills and blackly humorous gags that are…
In the House (2012): Dir. Francois Ozon
Feat. Fabrice Luchini, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner…; Set in a literary milieu, this deliciously warped meta drama from dir. Francois Ozon concerns the writings of a precocious 16–year–old…
Lesson of Evil (Lesson of the Evil) (2012): Dir. Takashi Miike
Feat. Yamada Takayuki, Mitsuru Fukikoshi, Hideaki Ito; Another manga adaption from director cult Takashi Miike based on the seinen manga on the same name. A successful English teacher who is secretly a…
Headhunters (2011): Dir. Morten Tyldum
Feat. Aksel Hennie, Synnove Macody Lund, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau…; Jo Nesbo's blockbusting crime novel about a corporate headhunter moonlighting as an art thief gets an appropriately energetic treatment, and with its…
Jackpot (Jo Nesbo's Jackpot) (2011): Dir. Magnus Martens
Feat. Kyrre Hellum, Mads Ousdal, Henrik Mestad…; This second helping of Jo Nesbo's blackly comic tales has the hapless sole survivor of a strip club massacre taken in for questioning where his…
Smuggler (2011): Dir. Katsuhito Ishii
Feat. Satoshi Tsumabuki, Masatoshi Nagase, Yasuko Matsuyuki…; An entertainingly schizophrenic black comedy by way of cult Japanese dir. Katsuhito Ishii, whose penchant for the wacky and surreal drives this…
Klown (2010): Dir. Mikkel Nørgaard
Feat. Frank Hvam, Casper Christensen, Marcuz Jess Petersen; Danish comedians Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen play debauched versions of themselves on a weekend canoe trip away with their long–suffering…
Dogtooth (Kynodontas) (2009): Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Feat. Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis…; An astringent, blackly comic tale of a modern Greek family whose adult children have been imprisoned in their home since birth. Something of a…
Micmacs (2009): Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Feat. Dany Boon, Andre Dussollier, Jean-Pierre Marielle…; The dir. of AMELIE and CITY OF LOST CHILDREN stays true to form(ula) with his visual chutzpah lavished upon another idealised scenario that this time…
Robogeisha (2009): Dir. Noboru Iguchi
Feat. Aya Kiguchi; Two sisters, recruited as assassins in a robotic geisha army, fight from the inside to take down the head of an evil corporation. More cartoonish,…
Louise - Michel (2008): Dir. Benoit Delepine, Gustave Kervern
Feat. Yolande Moreau, Bouli Lanners, Benoit Poelvoorde…; A black comedy treasure about a newly redundant factory worker who hires a dodgy hit man to take out her rich employers. The trouble starts when the…
Pain in the Ass, A (L'emmerdeur) (2008): Dir. Francis Veber
Feat. Richard Berry, Patrick Timsit, Pascal Elbé…; Fast–paced black comedy arises out of an unlikely friendship between a hitman and a depressive who find themselves sharing hotels. Based on…
Tony Manero (2008): Dir. Pablo Larrain
Feat. Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus, Héctor Morales; Unsettling drama set against the Pinochet regime in Chile in 1978, where a psychopathic disco fan steals and kills in an effort to become the…
Ugly Melanie (Vilaine) (2008): Dir. Jean-Patrick Benes, Allan Mauduit
Feat. Marilou Berry, Frédérique Bel; Mild black comedy set in a world of beauty or death, where ugly Melanie (Berry, not really ugly at all) plots a series of contrived punishments for…
You the Living (2007): Dir. Roy Andersson
Feat. Jessica Lundberg, Elisabeth Helander, Björn Englund; Master of the painstaking, deadpan vignette, Roy Andersson, continues his singular and obsessive vision with this absurdist comedy of…
Bothersome Man, The (2006): Dir. Jens Lien
Feat. Trond Fausa Aurvaag; A black comedy with a typically Scandinavian sense of absurdity and style, in which an amnesiac finds himself in an unfamiliar city with a new job,…
Adam's Apples (2005): Dir. Anders Thomas Jensen
Feat. Mads Mikkelsen, Ulrich Thomsen, Paprika Steen…; Roguishly sardonic Danish black comedy about a sanguine country vicar (CASINO ROYALE’s Mikkelsen) who encounters resistance from a neo–Nazi…
Ax, The (Le Couperet) (2005): Dir. Costa-Gavras
Feat. Jose Garcia, Karin Viard, Olivier Gourmet; Dastardly satire from the always–edgy Costa Gavras plumbs the depths of a corporate downsizing victim (Garcia) who resorts to murderous ways in…
Death of Mr Lazarescu, The (2005): Dir. Cristi Puiu
Feat. Ion Fiscuteanu, Luminita Gheorghiu; Whirling, labyrinthine black comedy follows with interest the Kafkaesque plight of an ailing elderly drunk, whose stomach pains are met with…
Ferpect Crime (Crimen Ferpecto) (2005): Dir. Alex de la Iglesia
Feat. Guillermo Toledo, Monica Cervera; A spunky Spanish black comedy set almost entirely in a department store, where an obnoxious playboy salesman is blackmailed by a…
Ordeal, The (Calvaire) (2004): Dir. Fabrice du Welz
Feat. Laurent Lucas; Less gruelling than its title suggests, this is a macabre, blackly humorous slice of "redneck gothic" from Belgium, in which a cabaret singer's…
Fear and Trembling (Stupeur et tremblements) (2003): Dir. Alain Corneau
Feat. Sylvie Testud; A Belgian translator (Testud) takes a job in the corporate world of Tokyo (a city where she was born and grew up) hoping to rediscover the culture…
Forest for the Trees, The (Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen) (2003): Dir. Maren Ade
Feat. Eva Löbau; Impressively insightful German drama following an idealistic young teacher who starts a job at a Karlsruhe school and contends with her own…
Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d'enfants) (2003): Dir. Yann Samuell
Feat. Marion Cotillard, Guillaume Canet; Two French kids develop an intense relationship through escalating games of "dare" that bond and haunt them through a turbulent teenage and…
Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok) (2003): Dir. Joon-ho Bong
Feat. Kang-ho Song, Sang-kyung Kim, Roe-ha Kim; A darkly lyrical thriller, set around the true–life hunt for South Korea's first documented serial killer in 1986, during the years of Chun…
Vodka Lemon (2003): Dir. Hiner Saleem
Feat. Romen Avinian; The residents of a diminishing Armenian village eke out meagre living in this sombre, if delightfully deadpan post–communist…
Suicide Club (Suicide Circle) (2002): Dir. Sion Sono
Feat. Ryo Ishibashi, Akaji Maro, Masatoshi Nagase; Off–beat Japanese thriller based on apparently real–life incidents in which groups of high–school children commit mass…
Tanguy (2001): Dir. Etienne Chatiliez
Feat. Sabine Azema, Andre Dussollier, Laurent Chouchan; A crowd–pleasing French comedy set around the efforts of a middle–aged couple to surreptitiously get their 28–year–old son to…
101 Reykjavik (2000): Dir. Baltasar Kormakur
Feat. Baltasar Kormakur, Victoria Abril; An endearingly skewed yet unexpectedly poignant sex comedy moored in the 30–below temperatures of the Icelandic winter, about a…
Barking Dogs Never Bite (Flandersui gae) (2000): Dir. Joon-ho Bong
Feat. Doona Bae; An accomplished black comedy from Korea, which follows an unemployed lecturer's annoyance with the barking of neighbourhood dogs through to its…
Attack the Gas Station (1999): Dir. Sang-Jin Kim
Feat. Sung-jae Lee, Oh-seong Yu, Seong-jin Kang…; Four disaffected youths take hostage an entire gas station in this subversive, blackly–comic masterpiece from Korea. Gleefully tearing apart…
Cabaret Balkan (The Powder Keg) (1999): Dir. Goran Paskaljevic
Feat. Nikola Ristanovski; Troubling split–portrait of the Serbian psyche, depicting a series of often violent incidents over the course of a single night in Belgrade,…
Carriers Are Waiting, The (Les Convoyeurs Attendent) (1999): Dir. Benoit Maraige
Feat. Benoit Poelvoorde, Morgane Simon, Bouli Laners; When journalist Benoit Poelvoorde decides his family MUST win top prize in local competition (which involves training his reluctant son to break the…
Celebration, The (Festen) (1999): Dir. Thomas Vinterberg
Feat. Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen; Conceived and executed under the "Dogma 95" manifesto, this corrosive black comedy sees the birthday celebrations of a wealthy family implode after…
Hypnosis (Saimin) (1999): Dir. Masayuki Ochiai
Feat. Hiroshi Inagaki, Miho Kanno; A mysterious force is causing a spate of bizarre suicides, creatively and gruesomely staged for our blackly comic pleasure, in this…
Inheritors, The (Die Siebtelbauern) (1998): Dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky; An earthily subversive drama set among a rural community of peasants and masters in an idyllic Austrian valley in the early 20th century. When the…
Quiet Family, The (Choyonghan kajok) (1998): Dir. Ji-woon Kim
Feat. Kang-ho Song, Min-sik Choi; A deliciously deadpan black comedy in which a respectable family decide to leave the rat race behind, buy a hotel in remote mountains and lead more…
For Roseanna (Roseanna's Grave) (1997): Dir. Paul Weiland
Feat. Mercedes Ruehl, Jean Reno; Terminally–ill Mercedes Ruehl's dying wish is to be buried in the local cemetary, but the plots are filling up fast, thus sending off her…
Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996): Dir. Sadjan Dragojevic
Feat. Dragan Bjelorgrlic, Nikola Kojo; Seen in flashback from a ward in triage, the Bosnian war is portrayed in a riveting counter–play of nihilism and theatre, as a band of Serbian…
Kamikaze Taxi (1995): Dir. Masato Harada
Feat. Koji Yakusho, Kazuya Takahashi, Reiko Kataoka; An apprentice gangster fouls up his first major assignment and flees Tokyo in a taxi, the driver of which turns out to be a unlikely confident with a…
Tango (1993): Dir. Patrice Leconte
Feat. Thierry Lhermitte, Philippe Noiret, Richard Bohringer; Left by his wife, Thierry Lhermitte hits the road to track her down with the help of his misogynist uncle, Phillippe Noiret. Hitman Richard Bohringer…
Wild Target (1992): Dir. Pierre Salvadori
Feat. Jean Rochefort, Guillaume Depardieu; Jean Rochefort is a fastidious hitman whose mania for control, both at home and on assignment, is dangerously weakened when he apprentices Gerard…
Tatie Danielle (1991): Dir. Etienne Chatiliez
Feat. Tsilla Chelton, Catherine Jacob, Isabelle Nanty…; Brilliantly absurd black comedy about an elderly widow who does her best to make life miserable for her relatives. Tsilla Chelton is irresistible as…
Trop Belle Pour Toi (Too Beautiful For You) (1989): Dir. Bertrand Blier
Feat. Gerard Depardieu, Josiane Balasko, Carole Bouquet; Car salesman Gerard Depardieu has a beautiful wife, but becomes infatuated with his plain yet passionate receptionist. Insightful, melancholy comedy.
Shadows in Paradise (Varjoja paratiisissa) (1986): Dir. Aki Kaurismaki
Feat. Matti Pellonpaa, Kati Outinen, Sakari Kuosmanen; The first film in Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy follows a lonely garbage collector who finds romance with a check–out clerk (Kaurismäki…
Funeral, The (1984): Dir. Juzo Itami
Feat. Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto; A Buddhist funeral service for a brothel owner makes an ideal vehicle for both fiendish black comedy and social satire. An assured debut from the…
What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984): Dir. Pedro Almodovar
Feat. Carmen Maura; Carmen Maura plays a delirious feminist housewife in this early black–comic farce from Almodovar, here working at his freshest and most…
Montenegro (1981): Dir. Dusan Makavejev
Feat. Susan Anspach, Erland Josephson, Marianna Jacobi; A bored housewife gets caught up in Slavic sex and violence and discovers that she quite likes it. Unpredictable and weird, things become wickedly…
Buffet Froid (Cold Cuts) (1979): Dir. Bertrand Blier
Feat. Gerard Depardieu, Bernard Blier, Jean Carmet…; When his lost switchblade turns up as a murder weapon, petty crim Gerard Depardieu goes on the lam in a nightmarish Paris, several disreputable…
Third Generation, The (Die Dritte Generation) (1979): Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Feat. Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Eddie Constantine…; A scathing black comedy about terrorism, one of the final films of German provocateur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A hilariously indiscriminate plot…
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Preparez Vos Mouchoirs) (1978): Dir. Bertrand Blier
Feat. Gerard Depardieu, Carole Laure, Patrick Dewaere; Naive, frustrated husband Gerard Depardieu embarks on an unconventional quest to find his listless wife some happiness, firstly by 'lending' her to a…
Despair (1977): Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Feat. Dirk Bogarde; Fassbinder's blackly comic adaptation of Nabakov's novel about delusion, depression and decline of the human spirit. Dirk Bogarde plays a Russian…
Satan's Brew (Satansbraten) (1976): Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Feat. Margit Carstensen, Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven…; Schizophrenic Fassbinder dramedy involving a German poet struck with writer's block that partakes in a number of moneymaking schemes involving his…
Stroszek (1976): Dir. Werner Herzog
Feat. Bruno S., Eva Mattes; Powerful tragi–comedy follows a simple–minded Bruno S to America with a prostitute trying to escape her unsavoury past. The film's…
Mother Kuesters Goes to Heaven (1975): Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Feat. Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Karlheinz Bohm…; A furiously witty political black comedy from New German Cinema iconoclast Rainer Werner Fassbinder, heavily inspired by the melodramas of Douglas…
Seven Beauties (1975): Dir. Lina Wertmuller
Feat. Giancarlo Giannini, Shirley Stoler; Wimpish Casanova Giancarlo Giannini is cast wherever the winds of WWII fling him: eventually into a German concentration camp run by Shirley Stoler…
Martha (1974): Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Feat. Margit Carstensen, Karlheinz Bohm; Addressing his favourite subject, emotional cruelty, Dir. Fassbinder skillfully works a vein of pitch–black comedy in depicting Margit…
Love and Anarchy (1973): Dir. Lina Wertmuller
Feat. Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato, Eros Pagni; Cult director Lina Wertmuller's political parable about the would–be assassin of Mussolini who falls in love with a prostitute at his…
A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (Une Belle Fille Comme Moi) (1972): Dir. Francois Truffaut
Feat. Bernadette Lafont, Andre Dussollier; Twisted French black comedy of a licentious, manipulative murderess recounting her sordid past to a green criminology student. Dripping in silly…
Fists in the Pocket (1965): Dir. Marco Bellochio
Feat. Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Mase; A ferocious intensity pervades this bitter yet utterly startling tale of a family afflicted with epilepsy, blindness and frustration, unafforded the…
Dov'e La Liberta...? (Where Is Freedom?) (1954): Dir. Roberto Rossellini
Feat. Toto, Vera Molnar, Nita Dover; Legendary Italian comic Toto plays a barber who cannot abide the hypocritical society he is thrust into after spending two decades in prison, and…

Main menu

Section navigation menu

Subgenre Sampler