MoviesHunt

How MoviesHunt looks

MoviesHunt keeps the manner of the site it is named after, a small film blog of 2019 made with a popular website builder. The page is white. The MoviesHunt name stands in the middle at the top, in dark blue with its second word in a lighter blue, over a line of small capitals. Beneath it, between two thin grey rules, are the menu links, Home, Hollywood, Family, Sport, Collections, A-Z and My List, with a search field at the right that is underlined instead of boxed.

A pale blue band carries the title of the site. Under it, headed Recent Posts, comes a column of six wide cards, laid out as a blog lays out its articles: a poster on the left, and on the right the year and running time in small grey type, the title in large letters, a few lines of the story and a Read More link in a thin blue frame. Two grids of smaller posters follow, Best Rated and The 2020s, and then three lists side by side: the categories with their counts, the decades and the help pages. The footer repeats the pale blue of the band.

The colours are few: white, pale blue, a dark blue for headings and a clear blue for links. The lettering is Arial throughout. On a telephone the menu folds behind a button with three lines, the post cards shrink to a small poster and a title, and the grids stand two posters to a row.

Family comedies

The Family category is the largest on MoviesHunt, with 80 films, and the Family comedies help page picks from it. Its favourite situation is the adult who is suddenly put in charge of a child, or the reverse.

Big, from 1988, directed by Penny Marshall, is the best of all. Josh Baskin, who is twelve and too short for a fairground ride, makes a wish at an old fortune-telling machine and wakes the next morning in the body of a man of thirty. He runs away to New York with the help of his best friend, finds work at a toy company, and rises quickly because he is the only employee who knows what children like. Tom Hanks plays the boy inside the man with such accuracy, the walk, the appetite, the way he eats a tiny ear of corn, that the film has little need to explain itself, and the scene in which he and his employer play a tune by dancing on a giant floor piano is one of the happiest in American film.

Uncle Buck, from 1989, written and directed by John Hughes, sends a cheerful, unreliable bachelor, played by John Candy, to look after his brother's three children in the suburbs; he makes pancakes the size of a table and frightens off an unsuitable boyfriend. Kindergarten Cop, from 1990, puts Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a detective working in disguise, in front of a class of five-year-olds, who defeat him within a morning. In 3 Men and a Baby, from 1987, three bachelors sharing a New York flat find a baby girl on the doormat. Twins, from 1988, pairs Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as brothers separated at birth, one raised as a perfect specimen on a tropical island and the other in an orphanage in Los Angeles.

Fathers are tested in film after film. In Liar Liar, from 1997, a fast-talking lawyer, played by Jim Carrey, misses his son's fifth birthday, and the boy wishes that his father would be unable to lie for a whole day; the wish comes true on the morning of an important trial. In Big Daddy, from 1999, an idle law graduate, played by Adam Sandler, takes in a five-year-old to impress a girlfriend and discovers that he likes the job. Daddy's Home, from 2015, sets a mild stepfather, played by Will Ferrell, against the children's dashing real father. Click, from 2006, gives an overworked architect a remote control that can skip the dull parts of his life, and shows him what he has skipped. Delivery Man, About My Father, with Robert De Niro, Man of the House and Playdate, from 2025, are other variations.

Mothers and grandmothers have their comedies too. Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, from 1992, saddles a tough policeman, played by Sylvester Stallone, with a visiting mother who tidies his flat and washes his revolver. The Guilt Trip, from 2012, sends an inventor, played by Seth Rogen, across America by car with his mother, played by Barbra Streisand. Life of the Party has a mother enrol at her daughter's university, and Oh. What. Fun., from 2025, stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a mother who is left behind by her own family at Christmas. The Farewell, from 2019, written and directed by Lulu Wang from her own experience, is quieter and finer than any of these: a young woman raised in New York returns to China, where her family has arranged a wedding as a pretext for gathering round a beloved grandmother.

For younger viewers there are Flubber, with Robin Williams as a professor who invents a bouncing green substance, Small Soldiers, Annie, from 2014, Problem Child, Adventures in Babysitting, in which a quiet evening in the suburbs turns into a night in the big city, The Addams Family, from 1991, with Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia as the head of a cheerfully gloomy household, three live-action films with the dog Scooby-Doo, Haunted Mansion, The Suite Life Movie, Henry Danger: The Movie, The Thundermans Return and Secret Headquarters.

The comedy stars

American comedy is built around its performers, and the Comedy stars category holds 55 films with the best known of them. The Comedy stars help page introduces them.

Adam Sandler has more films here than anyone. His early characters are overgrown boys with sudden tempers and soft hearts. In Billy Madison, from 1995, a hotel heir must repeat every year of school in twenty-four weeks to inherit the business. In Happy Gilmore, from 1996, a failed ice hockey player discovers that his slap shot can drive a golf ball four hundred yards, and joins the professional tour to save his grandmother's house; Happy Gilmore 2 arrived in 2025. The Waterboy, from 1998, is about the shy water carrier of a college football team in Louisiana who turns out to be a ferocious tackler. Anger Management, with Jack Nicholson as an alarming therapist, Click, The Cobbler, in which a shoe repairer can become his customers by wearing their shoes, and Hubie Halloween followed.

Jim Carrey, the most elastic face in the business, is here in Liar Liar and Dumb and Dumber To. Eddie Murphy appears in The Golden Child, from 1986, as a finder of lost children sent to Tibet, in A Thousand Words, and in Coming 2 America, from 2021, which returns to the African prince of his 1988 hit. Robin Williams is in Flubber; Steve Martin in The Pink Panther 2 and The Big Year, a gentle film about three men competing to see the most species of bird in a single year; and Bill Murray gives one of his best later performances in St. Vincent, from 2014, as a grumpy old man who becomes the reluctant babysitter of the boy next door.

Will Ferrell specialises in confident fools: a racing driver in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, a figure skater in Blades of Glory, in which two banned rivals return to the ice as the first all-male pair. Ben Stiller directed and stars in Zoolander, from 2001, about a male model of very little brain who is drawn into a plot, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, from 2013, about a daydreaming picture editor who finally sets out on a real adventure to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas. Kevin Hart, the fastest talker of the present, partners Dwayne Johnson in Central Intelligence, Ice Cube in Ride Along and Ride Along 2, and Bryan Cranston in The Upside. Melissa McCarthy, Steve Carell, Kevin James, in Here Comes the Boom, as a teacher who takes up cage fighting to pay for his school's music lessons, and Jackie Chan, in three films, complete the company.

Tom Hanks needs a paragraph to himself. After Big he made A League of Their Own, from 1992, also directed by Penny Marshall, about the professional baseball league for women founded during the Second World War; he plays the team's manager, a former star with a bad knee and a worse temper, opposite Geena Davis as his best player. The Terminal, from 2004, directed by Steven Spielberg, is the most popular film in this catalogue. Viktor Navorski arrives at a New York airport from a small European country at the very hour its government falls; his passport is suddenly worthless, he may neither enter America nor go home, and he lives for months in the departure hall, learning English from guidebooks, earning coins from luggage trolleys and making friends among the staff. It is a comedy about patience and decency, played with great delicacy.

Sport

Sport and comedy go well together, since both depend on underdogs. The Sport category holds 28 films, and the Sport help page arranges them by season.

Cool Runnings, from 1993, is the one everybody loves. It is based, loosely, on the true story of the first bobsleigh team from Jamaica, who competed at the Winter Olympics of 1988 in Calgary. A sprinter who has missed his chance at the Summer Games recruits two fellow runners and a champion of pushcart racing, persuades a disgraced former gold medallist, played by John Candy, to coach them, and takes them to a country where they see snow for the first time. They are laughed at, then admired, and the last scene, in which they finish their final run on foot, carrying the sled, is a fine piece of sporting cinema.

A League of Their Own is the classic of baseball. Ice appears in Blades of Glory, in Ice Princess, about a physics student who applies her science to figure skating, and in D2: The Mighty Ducks, about a junior hockey team. Golf is the subject of Happy Gilmore; American football of The Waterboy, The Replacements, in which Keanu Reeves leads a team of stand-in players during a strike, and 80 for Brady, about four friends in their eighties who travel to the championship game. Bring It On, from 2000, takes competitive cheerleading seriously and is very funny about it.

True stories supply the newest films. Battle of the Sexes, from 2017, recreates the tennis match of 1973 between Billie Jean King, played by Emma Stone, and the former champion Bobby Riggs, played by Steve Carell, which was watched by ninety million people. Fighting with My Family, from 2019, written and directed by Stephen Merchant, follows a girl from a family of wrestlers in Norwich to the professional rings of America. Next Goal Wins, from 2023, directed by Taika Waititi, is about the football team of American Samoa, once beaten by thirty-one goals, and the Dutch coach sent to help them score one. Grudge Match brings two elderly boxers, played by Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone, back for a last bout.

School and college

The School and college category holds 36 films, and the School and college help page describes them.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off, from 1986, written and directed by John Hughes, is the masterpiece of the kind. Ferris, a schoolboy in the suburbs of Chicago with boundless confidence, decides that a fine spring day is too good to spend in class. He pretends to be ill, collects his girlfriend and his anxious best friend Cameron, borrows the vintage sports car that Cameron's father loves more than his son, and drives into the city, where the three visit an art gallery, a baseball game and a very grand restaurant, and Ferris sings from a float in a street parade, while the dean of students tries to catch him out. Ferris speaks directly to the audience throughout, and the film's real subject turns out to be Cameron.

Napoleon Dynamite, from 2004, made on a tiny budget in a small town in Idaho, is its opposite: a comedy about a tall, awkward boy with a talent for drawing imaginary animals, his uncle, his brother and a friend who runs for class president, told with a perfectly straight face. Three O'Clock High, The New Guy, Mean Girls 2 and Mean Girls, the musical version of 2024, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Status Update and Theater Camp, from 2023, a comedy in the form of a documentary about a summer school for young actors, are set in and around school.

College is the setting of Accepted, from 2006, in which a boy rejected by every university invents one of his own, with a website, and is surprised when three hundred students arrive; of Orange County, about a talented young writer whose school sends the wrong papers with his application; of Sydney White, which retells Snow White on a campus; and of Life of the Party. The Way Way Back, from 2013, takes a shy fourteen-year-old on a miserable seaside holiday and gives him a summer job at a water park and a friend, played by Sam Rockwell, who teaches him to stand up straight.

The 1980s

The 1980s were a wonderful decade for the American comedy, and the The 1980s category holds 24 films from it. The The 1980s help page suggests where to begin.

Besides Big, Twins, Uncle Buck and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the decade produced Crocodile Dundee, from 1986, an Australian film that conquered the world: a New York reporter travels to the Northern Territory to interview a hunter who survived an encounter with a crocodile, and then brings him to Manhattan, where his bush manners and his very large knife meet the city. Paul Hogan wrote and starred in it, and Crocodile Dundee II followed. The Gods Must Be Crazy, from 1980, made in southern Africa, begins when an empty glass bottle falls from an aeroplane into a community of the Kalahari that has yet to see one.

Nine to Five, from 1980, stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as three office workers who take charge of their department and their impossible employer. Brewster's Millions, from 1985, gives a minor-league baseball player, played by Richard Pryor, thirty days to spend thirty million dollars and end with empty pockets, in order to inherit ten times as much. The Secret of My Success has Michael J. Fox as a postroom boy who impersonates an executive. The King of Comedy, from 1982, directed by Martin Scorsese, is darker and remarkable: Robert De Niro plays an aspiring comedian who will do anything to appear on a famous television programme.

The decade also loved a comic invention. In Short Circuit, from 1986, a military robot is struck by lightning and comes alive, with a great appetite for reading. In Innerspace, from 1987, directed by Joe Dante, a test pilot is shrunk to the size of a speck and injected, by mistake, into a nervous supermarket clerk, played by Martin Short. Ladyhawke, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by Terry Gilliam, National Lampoon's European Vacation, The Cannonball Run and its sequel, and Terms of Endearment, from 1983, a comedy and drama about a mother and daughter across thirty years, which won five Academy Awards, show how wide the word comedy stretched.

Spies and capers

The Spies and capers category holds 71 films in which danger is played for laughs, and the Spies and capers help page sorts them.

Johnny English, from 2003, stars Rowan Atkinson as the least capable agent in British intelligence, promoted when every other agent is put out of action, and sent to recover the stolen Crown Jewels. He is vain, brave and wrong about everything, and Johnny English Strikes Again, from 2018, in which he is recalled from his job as a schoolmaster to fight a threat from the internet with the methods of the 1970s, is quite as funny. Spy Hard, with Leslie Nielsen, is a parody of every spy film at once. My Spy, from 2020, and My Spy The Eternal City attach a huge, humourless agent, played by Dave Bautista, to a nine-year-old girl who has caught him on camera and wants lessons.

Mismatched partners are the usual engine. In Shanghai Noon, from 2000, Jackie Chan plays an imperial guard from China who comes to the Wild West to rescue a princess and falls in with a talkative, incompetent outlaw played by Owen Wilson; Shanghai Knights takes them to Victorian London, and Around the World in 80 Days gives Chan the part of the valet. Central Intelligence, Ride Along, Hot Pursuit, with Reese Witherspoon as a policewoman escorting a witness played by Sofia Vergara, Keeping Up with the Joneses, Date Night, in which a suburban couple take another couple's table at a restaurant and are mistaken for them, and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous follow the same pattern. Maverick, from 1994, is a comic western about a card player on his way to a great poker game, and Rat Race, from 2001, sends a crowd of strangers racing across the desert for two million dollars in a station locker.

Fantasy and science fiction

The Fantasy and science fiction category holds 30 films, and the Fantasy and science fiction help page divides them into wishes and inventions.

The wish is the oldest device in comedy: give a character exactly what was asked for, and watch. Big, Liar Liar and Click work this way, and so does A Thousand Words, in which a literary agent who talks for a living learns that he has only a thousand words left to speak. Pleasantville, from 1998, is the most thoughtful of them. A brother and sister of the 1990s are drawn into a black-and-white television comedy of the 1950s, where the weather is always fine and the books in the library are blank; as they disturb its routines, colour begins to appear, a rose, a face, a whole street. Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon play the visitors.

Ghosts and monsters are treated lightly. Ghostbusters, from 2016, gives the famous business to four women, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, from 2024, brings several generations of the team together in New York. The School for Good and Evil sends two friends to a pair of academies where fairy-tale heroes and villains are trained. Black Knight and Just Visiting move their heroes between the Middle Ages and the present, An American Pickle, from 2020, wakes a labourer of 1919 in modern Brooklyn after a century preserved in brine, and Brigsby Bear, from 2017, is a tender oddity about a young man whose whole world was a children's programme made for him alone.

Comedy with heart

Some of the best films on MoviesHunt make an audience laugh on the way to something else. The Comedy with heart category holds 54 of them, and the Comedy with heart help page suggests a few.

The Bucket List, from 2007, directed by Rob Reiner, puts a billionaire, played by Jack Nicholson, and a motor mechanic, played by Morgan Freeman, in the same hospital room; they draw up a list of things to do while there is time, and set off to do them, from skydiving to the pyramids. The Upside, from 2019, an American version of a French success, is about a wealthy man who is paralysed and the unqualified assistant he hires because the man makes him laugh. Last Vegas sends four friends in their seventies to a wedding. The Peanut Butter Falcon, from 2019, follows a young man with Down syndrome who leaves his care home to find a wrestling school and travels down the coast of North Carolina on a raft with a fisherman on the run; it is a modern Huckleberry Finn and one of the warmest films of its decade.

My Girl, from 1991, is told by Vada, who is eleven, lives above her father's funeral parlour in a small town in 1972, and has one friend, a boy with allergies. Steel Magnolias, from 1989, is set in a beauty salon in Louisiana, where six women meet across several years of weddings, births and sorrows. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, from 2015, is about a schoolboy who makes home-made parodies of famous films and is told by his mother to befriend a classmate who is ill. Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Please Stand By, about a young woman with autism who travels alone to deliver her script to a competition, Then Came You, Uptown Girls, Table 19 and Rental Family, from 2025, with Brendan Fraser as an American actor in Tokyo who is hired to play parts in strangers' lives, belong on the same shelf.

On the road

The On the road category holds 52 films about journeys and strangers abroad, and the On the road help page maps them.

India appears in three of the most enjoyable. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, from 2012, sends seven British pensioners, played by Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and others, to a hotel in Jaipur that is rather less finished than its brochure, under a young manager, played by Dev Patel, whose optimism is unbreakable. The Hundred-Foot Journey, from 2014, produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, follows a family from Mumbai who open an Indian restaurant in a French village, exactly one hundred feet across the road from a celebrated French one run by Helen Mirren; Om Puri plays the father. The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir, from 2018, stars Dhanush as a street magician from Mumbai who travels to Paris and is carried across Europe inside a wardrobe.

American journeys include City Slickers, from 1991, in which three friends from New York, facing their fortieth birthdays, sign up to drive cattle across the West under a leathery trail boss, played by Jack Palance, who won an Academy Award for the part; Vegas Vacation; The Dukes of Hazzard; and Hot Rod, about an amateur stuntman saving for his stepfather's operation. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, from 2022, is about a London cleaner of the 1950s who saves every penny to buy a dress from the house of Dior, and wins over the whole establishment.

From Britain

A dozen of the films here were made in Britain or about it, and the From Britain help page lists them. Besides the two films with Johnny English and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, there is The Lady in the Van, from 2015, the true story of an elderly woman who parked her van in the drive of the playwright Alan Bennett and stayed for fifteen years, with Maggie Smith in the part she had played on stage. One Chance tells how a shy mobile telephone salesman from Wales won a television talent contest by singing opera. Blinded by the Light, from 2019, directed by Gurinder Chadha, is about a British-Pakistani teenager in the town of Luton in 1987 whose life is changed by the songs of Bruce Springsteen. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the Victorian artist whose drawings of cats delighted the nation.

The people behind the laughter

The Directors help page names the film-makers who shaped these comedies. John Hughes, who wrote and directed Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Uncle Buck, understood children and teenagers better than anyone in Hollywood and wrote parts for them that adults envied. Ivan Reitman, a Canadian, had the idea of putting Arnold Schwarzenegger into comedy and made Twins and Kindergarten Cop. Penny Marshall, a television comedienne turned director, made Big and A League of Their Own within four years.

Joe Dante brought a love of old cartoons to Innerspace and Small Soldiers. Mel Brooks, the master of parody, is represented by Robin Hood: Men in Tights, from 1993, and his stage musical became The Producers, from 2005. The Coen brothers made Hail, Caesar!, from 2016, a comedy about one day in the life of a Hollywood studio in the 1950s, with George Clooney as a kidnapped star. Dennis Dugan and Frank Coraci directed most of the Adam Sandler films, Peter Segal made Anger Management, Grudge Match and My Spy, Tim Story made Barbershop and the two films called Ride Along, and Jerry Seinfeld directed himself in Unfrosted, from 2024, an invented history of a famous breakfast pastry.

Supporting players matter as much in comedy as stars. John Candy, the large and lovable Canadian of Uncle Buck, Cool Runnings and Brewster's Millions, is missed in every film made since he died. Kathy Bates is the mother in The Waterboy, Christopher Walken appears where least expected, and Rob Schneider turns up in almost every film Adam Sandler makes. Once a few of these faces are familiar, the films begin to feel like visits to the same friendly company.

Decade by decade

Five categories arrange the catalogue by date, and the Decade by decade help page describes them. The 1980s holds 24 films and has been described above. The 1990s holds 28: Kindergarten Cop, The Addams Family, City Slickers, My Girl, A League of Their Own, Cool Runnings, Happy Gilmore, Liar Liar, Pleasantville and Big Daddy.

The 2000s holds 40: Shanghai Noon, Bring It On, Zoolander, Rat Race, Johnny English, Napoleon Dynamite, The Terminal, Click, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and The Bucket List. The 2010s is the largest, with 51: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Way Way Back, St. Vincent, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Central Intelligence, Hail, Caesar!, Fighting with My Family, The Farewell and The Peanut Butter Falcon. The 2020s holds 27, from My Spy and Hubie Halloween to Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Next Goal Wins, Theater Camp, Unfrosted, Happy Gilmore 2 and Rental Family.

The Best rated category gathers the 50 films rated 6.7 or more out of ten by viewers around the world. Comedy is a matter of taste more than any other genre, and a film that critics dismissed may be the one that makes a particular household laugh until it hurts; the Recent Posts feed on the home page, ordered by the number of votes, is a second guide.

Finding a film

There are several ways to find a film on MoviesHunt, and the Finding titles help page describes each one. The search field beside the menu accepts a title and shows matching films as you type. The A to Z page lists all 170 films in alphabetical order, the Hollywood page lists them by popularity, and the Categories and Decades lists on the home page show how many films each one holds.

A few titles need care. Sequels are listed under their own names, so Happy Gilmore and Happy Gilmore 2, Zoolander and Zoolander 2, Problem Child and Problem Child 2 sit side by side, while Dumb and Dumber To is spelt as its makers spelt it. Titles that begin with a number, 3 Men and a Baby and 80 for Brady, are filed before the letter A. Punctuation is ignored by the search, and a single distinctive word, Bueller, Zoolander or Marigold, is usually enough.

What a title page shows

The page for each film follows one pattern. First come the poster, the title, the year, the running time and the average rating given by viewers worldwide. The story follows, with the genres, the director and the leading cast, and beneath them a row of films drawn from the same categories. The Watch now button lists the official services that offer the film in your country.

Hollywood comedies are widely available. The studios that made them now run streaming services of their own, the general services license hundreds more, and almost every title can be rented or bought for a small sum from the digital shops. Many are offered with Hindi and other soundtracks or subtitles, chosen in the player. What a subscription includes changes from month to month, so the list on each title page is the place to look.

The Add to My List button on a title page keeps a film for another evening. The list is stored in your browser on your own device, requires neither a login nor a password, and is opened from the My List link at the end of the menu. The My List help page explains how to remove films and how to copy the list to another device.

A first week

Here are seven evenings for a household new to the catalogue. On the first, watch Big. On the second, Cool Runnings. On the third, The Terminal. On the fourth, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. On the fifth, Liar Liar. On the sixth, Johnny English, which needs very little dialogue to be understood, and on the seventh, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, for the grandparents.

A second week might hold A League of Their Own, Twins, Napoleon Dynamite, The Farewell, Happy Gilmore, The Peanut Butter Falcon and Pleasantville. For an evening with small children, choose Flubber, Annie or Uncle Buck; for teenagers, Bring It On, Accepted or The Way Way Back; and for a long weekend, the pair of films about Mick Dundee or the pair about the Shanghai Kid.

One last suggestion: watch comedies together. A film that raises a smile from a viewer sitting alone will bring down the house when four people watch it side by side, and the films gathered here were made for rooms full of people. That is why they have lasted, and why a guide that helps a family agree on tonight's choice is worth keeping in a bookmark.

What the ratings mean

Every film on MoviesHunt was rated PG-13, PG or G by the American ratings board when it was released. G means suitable for all ages, PG suggests that parents may wish to watch with younger children, and PG-13 advises that some material may be unsuitable for those under thirteen, which in a comedy usually means some slapstick, a few jokes for the adults and mild language. Films that received the stricter R rating were left out, and so were PG-13 parodies whose humour is mainly crude. The gentlest titles for small children include Flubber, Annie, Ice Princess, D2: The Mighty Ducks, The Suite Life Movie and High School Musical 3: Senior Year.

The kinds of comedy

It helps to know what sort of laughter a film is after, since the word comedy covers a great deal. Slapstick, the comedy of the body, of falls, chases and collisions, is the oldest kind, and it is alive in Johnny English, Beverly Hills Ninja, The Three Stooges and Black Sheep, with the late Chris Farley, who could fall down a hill more expressively than anyone since the silent era. Children understand slapstick at once, and it travels across every language.

The comedy of character rests on one person whose way of seeing the world is slightly wrong: Ferris, who believes rules are for others; Napoleon, who believes he is impressive; Derek in Zoolander, who believes he is clever. The comedy of situation puts ordinary people somewhere they have small business being, a policeman in a kindergarten, a New Yorker on a cattle drive, a bushman in Manhattan. The fish out of water, as the trade calls it, is the commonest plot in this catalogue, and Crocodile Dundee, The Terminal, Just Visiting, Black Knight and An American Pickle are all versions of it.

Parody imitates another kind of film in order to tease it. Robin Hood: Men in Tights teases the swashbuckler, Spy Hard the secret agent film, and Hail, Caesar! the whole of old Hollywood, with its musicals, westerns and epics. Satire has a target in the real world: Nine to Five aims at the office, The King of Comedy at celebrity, Unfrosted at big business. And the comedy with a tear in it, which the Americans call a dramedy, hopes that the audience will leave moved as well as amused; Terms of Endearment, Steel Magnolias, St. Vincent and The Farewell are the best examples here.

Comedies for the season

Some films belong to a time of year. For the end of October there are Hubie Halloween, in which the most timid man in the town of Salem, armed with a flask of soup, turns out to be its protector; The Addams Family; Haunted Mansion; and the three films with the cowardly dog and his friends, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster. For Christmas there is Oh. What. Fun., and for the first week of summer, when school is over, there are The Way Way Back, Theater Camp and Adventures in Babysitting.

Weddings and reunions are served by Table 19, about the guests placed at the least important table of a wedding reception, License to Wed, with Robin Williams as a clergyman who tests an engaged couple, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, about a television host who returns to his family in the South, and The First Wives Club, from 1996, in which three old friends, played by Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton, join forces after their husbands leave them. For a birthday that ends in a nought, City Slickers and Last Vegas are the films, and for an evening after a hard week at work, Nine to Five and The Secret of My Success are as appealing as ever.

And some films are for any day at all. Twins, Major Payne, in which a hardened marine is put in charge of a class of small cadets, Guarding Tess, about a former First Lady and the weary agent assigned to protect her, Down Periscope, about the worst submarine in the navy, Duplex, about a young couple and the sweet old tenant upstairs, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, about two stage magicians of Las Vegas who have grown to dislike each other, ask only for ninety minutes and a comfortable chair.

How the catalogue is kept

MoviesHunt chooses its films by hand. Each title was first checked against its certificate, and then a person read its story and the notes written for parents before deciding. The descriptions are brief and plain, the years and running times match the public film databases, and the posters are the official ones. The post feed, the grids and the counts in the lists are refreshed along with the catalogue.

MoviesHunt is a guide. It holds neither films nor files to download; the Watch now button opens an official, licensed service, so the people who made the film are paid when you watch.

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