Little Miss Sunshine is an apt title for such a rapturous ray of sunlit glee. The title card plays over a morose-looking Steve Carell, his face a picture of misery. The juxtaposition of optimistic words over his pessimistic outlook is filmmaker’s Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ little clue that the light in their story is discovered in the intricacies of human dysfunction and alienation. It is possible to have a wholly satisfying tale of hopefulness and happy-endings without any semblance of saccharine sentimentality. Little Miss Sunshine is proof positive that in the realities of life’s little challenges, failure is not a cause for misery but a step on the road to living.

“An American Werewolf In London” is the film that I remember most distinctly as a child. It’s partly because I knew I wasn’t allowed to watch it, partly because it scared me so much. It’s only later in life that I fully appreciate the frightening influence it had on me – the reason I slept with the light on for weeks afterwards – was because it was so good. It is the cinema of attractions, the spectacle. An immediate and direct injection of emotion, be it humour, fear, anger, happiness. John Landis was a master at toying with his audience’s primal emotions. But, with classic Hollywood narrative as his blueprint, he could also tell a great story.

Said to be an un-filmable novel (and probably rightly so), approaching the movie adaptation of “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy” you’d be forgiven for wondering just how the hell director Michael Winterbottom pulled it off. Well, he didn’t, exactly. It isn’t that the film doesn’t look at both the ‘life’ and the ‘opinions’ of Laurence Sterne’s titular character, it’s more that it rolls it all up into a bite-size bundle of non-linear narration, film-within-a-film-within-a-film invention, and wry satirical asides which celebrate the originality, humour and post-modern techniques of the original literature.

We’ve all had the discussion. We’ve all argued over which film is funnier – “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” or ” Blazing Saddles”? And we’ve all come to different conclusions. Even Channel 4 and the American Film Institute have failed to satisfy our need to discover the best comedy movie ever made. Fear not. The answer is not far away. In the ultimate battle, Anomalous Material will pit 128 of the very finest comedy movies against each other. Only the strongest will survive. Hit the link below to influence the result and cast your vote!

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Steve Martin was ‘born standing up’: A Brief Introduction
Steve Martin was born in Texas, 1945. He quickly found a kinship with showmanship and entertainment by performing magic tricks, juggling, and playing the banjo to small audiences at Disneyland. Martin was, in his own words “born standing up”.
His first big break came in 1967. Girlfriend Nina Goldblatt, a dancer on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”, submitted some of Martin’s work to head writer Mason Williams. Williams liked what he saw to such a …