Scream 4

The kill count at ten minutes is five, halfway through it is seven, and overall, thirteen - not bad for an hour and forty minutes - so number four in the meta-horror series really drives the knife in for slasher fans, but even in an exercise this tongue-in-cheek - and it succeeds in being funny a number of times - it can be frustrating sitting through the idiocy on display: remember, Ghostface is a serial killer who has well and truly put a dent in the population of Woodsboro High on three previous occasions, yet in the midst of spree number four, as the body count rises, these teens hold parties, get drunk, wander outside into the dark woods, and play astonishingly tone-deaf "Ghostface" pranks on each other, making it more than a little tiresome waiting out the Scooby-Doo unmasking at the end.

★★★☆☆

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A Bad Moms Christmas (2017)

"The relationship between a mother and a daughter is complex," says a character in one of this sequel's few scenes that isn't a not-very-funny penis-centric R'n'B music montage, and the best way to demonstrate this complexity is probably not by introducing into the Bad Moms mix three completely over-the-top mother caricatures - a Bree Van de Kamp controlling one, a co-dependent best friend one, and an unnreliable woman-child one - because not only do these cartoons not seem like real moms, they do not have complex relationships with their daughters and their presence all but eclipses the three perfectly imperfect original bad moms that were so endearing and funny in number one.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Boss (2016)

It starts out looking like it's going to be a comedy about a charlatan who commands megabucks for financial advice delivered via big arena concerts but quickly shifts focus to the relationship this business mogul has with her staff, but that only lasts one scene - one of the staff members you see actually vanishes from the movie after this elaborate introduction - and then, just as suddenly, the movie becomes a Get Hard-style comedy about the mogul spending time in prison like Martha Stew--...but before you can even say her name, the mogul is released from prison and ends up sleeping on the couch of her long-suffering assistant and so you think you are actually watching a rehash of Trading Places, until a West Side Story war between rival Girl Guide gangs erupts...and all these tonal shifts never stop - the movie ends with you never feeling like you ever quite understood what story you were watching, except it is clear it is a not especially funny one.

★☆☆☆☆

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Bad Moms (2016)

On the basis of other "Bad..." movies (Bad Grandpa, Bad Santa, Bad Teacher, Bad Teddybear (well, Ted)), you'd be excused for dismissing this as just the latest middling grossout comedy about responsibility-shirkers, but in fact this one is carried off by such a winning cast (Mila Kunis gives a career best performance, and Kristen Bell, Christina Applegate, and Kathryn Hahn in the Melissa McCarthy role are hilarious), and is overall such a warm and winning tribute (we discover that the bad moms of the title are mothers everywhere struggling to do their best) that you can forgive the sequences that fall flat and the comedy's frequent disingenuousness about single parents and in the way it presents Mila Kunis as a dag needing fashion and relationship help.

★★★★☆

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Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Jason Segel is a likeable presence on film and his willingness to appear ridiculous - for example, here appearing in regular and unflattering full-frontal nude scenes - helps ground this ensemble comedy about a breakup complicated by celebrity; it's a film that easily could have been a puerile mess but thanks enormously to Segel's shamelessness it is actually very funny.

★★★☆☆

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Movie 43 (2013)

Perhaps compiled from footage recovered from the SNL cutting room floor, this laugh-free sketch comedy compilation is remarkable only for the incredible number of A-list Hollywood stars who were willing to appear in its appalling skits about excrement, sperm, grubby sex practices, incest...

☆☆☆☆☆

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