What Comedy Movies to watch on Criterion Channel

Harold Lloyd as a lovelorn playwright.

Timid milkman, Burleigh Sullivan (Lloyd), somehow knocks out a boxing champ in a brawl. The fighter's manager decides to build up the milkman's reputation in a series of fixed fights and then have the champ beat him to regain his title.

Yolanda sings in a seedy nightclub. When her boyfriend dies of an overdose, she fears the police and seeks refuge in a convent that saves women from the streets. These off-beat nuns include a heroin using abbess who loves Yolanda, one who writes romance novels under a pseudonym, another raising a tiger in the convent yard, and one who designs fabulous fashions and is in love with the local priest. They plan an evening extravaganza starring Yolanda to celebrate the abbess's birthday and to convince their wealthy patron not to abandon them.

A classic Lloyd short from 1920. Blase eastern boy is shipped off to a ranch in the 'wild west ' by his father.

When a young man and his friends dig a hole to expand their restaurant, they enter a nearby bank vault that is being robbed.

The story of how a small drugstore owner became the exclusive selling agent of a cheap Indian generic drug against Chronic Granulocytic Leukemia in China.

The most important family in Hickoryville is (naturally enough) the Hickorys, including Sheriff Jim and his tough, manly sons Leo and Olin. The timid youngest son Harold doesn't have the muscles to match up to them, so he must use his wits to win the respect of his strong father--and also the love of beautiful Mary.

Our hero (Lloyd) is infatuated with a girl in the next office. In order to drum up business for her boss, an osteopath, he gets an actor friend to pretend injuries that the doctor "cures", thereby building a reputation. When he hears that his girl is marrying another, he decides to commit suicide and spends the bulk of the film in thrilling, failed attempts.

Isabelle has just returned from a humiliating date with her lover Vincent. The divorced painter with a 10-year-old daughter zaps from one relationship to the next. In Paris, she is surrounded by people and yet alone - in her search for love, she encounters all kinds of weird, pitiful, seductive and unnecessary forms of masculinity. Isabelle, around 50, lives the typical big city single life. She is a strong and independent woman who is recognized as an artist, but when it comes to love, she seems to have given up. It's a good thing her friend Ariane is always there to cheer her up. Isabelle has to admit to herself that her search for true love is failing because of the discrepancy between her aspirations and the compromises she has to make every time. The gap between what women want and what men are prepared to give seems too wide ... In her helplessness, Isabelle hopes that fortune teller Denis, of all people, will answer the question that is bothering her more than anything else: Does love for life exist or is it just a utopia?

Shing Lung (Jackie Chan) is a youngster, living in a remote village with his grandfather who teaches him Kung-Fu. He keeps getting into fights, even though his grandfather warns him not to show their Kung-Fu to others. Lung, though, is tempted by some thugs he beat up to act as the Master of a Kung Fu school. This school's name apparently spreads far, as an old enemy of Lung's grandfather shows up and attacks him. Lung goes on training with the help of another member of the old gang, until he can eventually get revenge.

Separated from her incarcerated husband Bill (Hinds), Trish (Janney) is about to marry again. Bill is a pedophile, so Trish couldn't be more excited to have Harvey (Lerner), a "normal" father figure for her two sons. But when Bill is released from prison and the boys finally meet their future stepdad, the family is forced to decide whether to forgive or to forget. Trish's virginal, angelic sister Joy (Henderson), is also haunted by ghosts of lovers past. On leave from her degenerate husband Allen (Williams) and her job at a New Jersey correctional facility, Joy unwittingly leaves behind a trail of shame and exposed secrets wherever she goes. In one of the film's most stylized sequences, the image of Joy walking the dark streets of Miami in her nightgown maintains her innocence against a backdrop of self-affliction and desire.

Charlie does everything but an efficient job as janitor. Edna buys her fiance, the cashier, a birthday present. Charlie thinks "To Charles with Love" is for him. He presents her a rose which she throws in the garbage. Depressed, Charlie dreams of a bank robbery and his heroic role in saving the manager and Edna ... but it is only a dream.

A boy makes friends with a seemingly sentient red balloon, and it begins to follow him. It follows him to the bus stop, to school, and to church. They play together in the streets of Paris and try to elude a gang of boys that wants to steal it.

Housewife and grandmother Roberta struggles to fit the conformist society she lives in and turns to amphetamines and booze to cure her boredom.

Having been away for four months, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) walks into the offices of the New York City-based The Morning Post, where she is a star reporter, to tell her boss, editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant), that she is quitting. The reason for her absence was among other things to get a Reno divorce, from, of all people, Walter, who admits he was a bad husband. Hildy divorced Walter largely because she wanted more of a home life, whereas Walter saw her more as a driven hard-boiled reporter than subservient homemaker. Hildy has also come to tell Walter that she is taking the afternoon train to Albany, where she will be getting married tomorrow to staid straight-laced insurance agent, Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), with whose mother (Alma Kruger) they will live, at least for the first year. Walter doesn't want to lose Hildy, either as a reporter or a wife, and if he does, doesn't believe Bruce is worthy of her. Walter does whatever he can at least to delay Hildy and Bruce's trip, long enough to persuade Hildy to stay for good. His plan includes doing whatever he can to place Bruce in a bad light, while dangling a big story under her nose, namely covering what the newspaper believes is the unfair imminent execution of convicted cop killer, Earl Williams (John Qualen). Hildy doesn't trust Walter in dealing with her and Bruce in an above-board manner, but the lure of what potentially may become the biggest story in years, which includes true love, a bumbling sheriff (Gene Lockhart) and a corrupt mayor (Clarence Kolb), the latter's actions largely in light of an upcoming election, may prove to be too much for Hildy to resist, especially if it ends up being an exclusive. Regardless of the story outcome, Hildy will have to decide if the thrill of the chase was worth the anguish on her personal life.

Adventurous and bold mother of two, PENELOPE, struggles to strike the balance between her artistic aspirations and motherly responsibilities in this playful look at modern-day motherhood and the difficulties families face everyday.

Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in Equinox Flower, his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned father and his newfangled daughter.

After a wild bachelor party, our hero finds himself aboard a sailing vessel where he encounters numerous adventures. In a dream sequence, he fantasizes that the ship is seized by a band of female pirates.

Marty "Alfred Molina" is a jazz musician, always a precarious source of livelihood even for the best-known performers. In this film, he is just barely getting by, living on the outskirts of a run-down town populated by Irish immigrants. Though this might be called a highly successful life for a jazz musician, it is hardly satisfying. He hangs out a bar called The Rose of Sharon and is friends with its irrepressible barmaid, Sheila "Maggie O'Neill". When Sheila introduces Marty to the ghostly inhabitants of a rocking chair, they embark on a series of adventures that result in satisfaction for all concerned - except for the bar's owner, who killed one of the ghosts "Marianne Faithfull" when she was among the living.

One of the most acclaimed films of this year's Sundance Film Festival, Azazel Jacobs' third feature is both a tribute to his parents (and to the lost New York of his childhood) and an acutely perceptive, deeply personal take on a universal experience: the fear of growing up.

A man is hired by a group of people he believes to be gangsters to escort a briefcase from America to Hong Kong, but when he arrives, his contact is nowhere to be found. With no further instructions, he decides to take in the sights of Hong Kong, which consist of him taking part in a great deal of blood, sex, and general weirdness, all while wearing a briefcase handcuffed to his arm.

A satirical comedy about the excessive restrictions that children face during their vacation in a Young Pioneer camp.

18-year-old school girl Shengnan enters a night of adventure in the adults' world.

In Japan, the small Masashi moves from one evacuation center to a small town. There you will discover that every child has the right to communicate with a fantastic creature, but these are being used in an evil plan to collect negative energy of children.