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The requirements were that actors must have begun their mainstream careers in comedy in order to be eligible for this collection. For instance, Whoopi Goldberg, who frequently starred in dramas such as The Color Purple in her early career, is dismissed by this. Additionally, only films in which the actor portrayed the lead or a significant supporting part were selected. No cameos or bit parts permitted. Without further ado, the Top 10 Best Recent TV Comedy Series nominees for Best Dramatic Film Featuring a Comedy Actor are listed chronologically.

The Hustler (1961)
It’s possible that Jackie Gleason was the first Hollywood celebrity to be typecast. He is still almost inextricably linked to the legendary bus driver Ralph Kramden from the breakthrough sitcom The Honeymooners in the 1950s. Gleason’s portrayal of Kramden is so deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness that the character is commemorated with a statue at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. [1] In order for the husky Gleason to successfully emerge from Kramden’s huge shadow, he had to play another role that was larger than life. His role as renowned pool player Minnesota Fats in the 1961 drama The Hustler provided him with that opportunity.

Gleason’s Minnesota Fats, who plays small-time pool hustler “Fast Eddie” Felson opposite Paul Newman, serves as a model for many subsequent arrogant antagonists in sports movies. A heavyset Apollo Creed to Newman’s Rocky, Gleason loses but soon recovers to pay off a $18,000 debt owed to the newcomer Felson. Despite his efforts to improve for a rematch with the champion, Felson then sets out on a heroic journey that is interspersed with romance and physical setbacks, including two broken thumbs. The Hustler got an incredible eight Academy Award nominations, including Newman for Best Actor, Gleason for Best Supporting Actor, and Best Picture. It tells a tale of winning, losing, and character development set against the gritty backdrop of pool halls in the 1960s. It took home the black-and-white awards for both cinematography and art direction. It had an equally significant cultural impact, leading to a resurgence in pool’s popularity.

In 1978, Blue Collar
With a number of critically acclaimed comedy albums, acting roles, and writing credits under his belt, Richard Pryor is one of the few comedians who don’t need to do anything serious to be taken seriously. In light of this, the 1978 crime drama Blue Collar, which stars Pryor opposite Harvey Keitel, shows the comedian taking a different approach despite being at the top of his game. Pryor is on everyone’s short list of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, including the top spot on Rolling Stone’s rankings. Two impoverished autoworkers loot the union’s safe as the movie examines the decline of labor unions in late 1970s America. Pryor’s character, Zeke Brown, is forced to work for the dishonest union bosses with promises of financial and professional gains after an unsuccessful attempt to blackmail the union ends in one of their murders. Both Pryor and the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, particularly from renowned movie-review teams Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Despite not taking much money with them, they find a ledger that documents evidence of the union’s illegal loan operation and ties to organized crime. Additionally, it has a rare perfect score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes [4].

“One Hour Photo” (2002)
One Hour Photo is Robin Williams’ best performance as the lead actor, but Good Will Hunting is the most critically acclaimed movie with him in a serious role (he also kept the overrated Al Pacino film Insomnia from being unwatchable). The 2002 film offers a terrifying premonition of our social media-dominated, privacy-depriving world. “He knows your name. He knows your life. He knows where you live.” Williams’ voice then says, “The word ‘snapshot’ was originally a hunting term.” Williams plays Seymour “Sy” Parrish, a film developer at a large box store. The eerie trailer intersperses clips with more dire threats. This theme, seen through the filtered lens of social media today, bears an uncanny resemblance to the alienation people can experience when scrolling through Facebook and seeing beaming, laughing, and mostly cherry-picked personal highlight reels. Socially awkward, single, and obsessed with a family he idolizes as picture-perfect, Sy’s idyllic vision of the family is shattered when he finds out that the husband is having an affair. By fusing pictures of the tryst with family images, he practically reveals the mistress to the wife. Since One Hour Photo was created four years before Facebook, its “dangers of social media” themes—smile-for-the-camera phoniness, FOMO-ism, and life envy—make it distinctly ahead of its time. Later, he follows the husband and mistress to a hotel room, where he coerces them with knives to pose in obscene ways for his camera.

Translation Lost (2003)
The lowest-budget movie on this list is a dramatization of a casting conference. “We have four million dollars [5] to shoot on location in Tokyo.” For ninety minutes of sexual tension with a young, unknown actress, who should we get to essentially flop around a hotel?’Alright. Make the call. Lost in Translation is undoubtedly the most commercially successful movie on this list and is also possibly the greatest. Lost in Translation, a dramatic, cinematic Seinfeld, is a film about nothing that is driven only by characters. It was shot in just 27 days and made about 30 times its tiny budget [7], catapulting Scarlett Johansson to prominence. Johansson, who recently got married, is going on a business trip with her spouse, a famous photographer, while Bill Murray plays an American actor filming a commercial in Japan. The most intriguing aspect of the film is the intergenerational sexual tension between the two, who are cooped up in the same opulent hotel and play off each other’s loneliness, insomnia, boredom, and culture shock in a stubbornly insular nation devoid of other English speakers. Johansson is doubting her new vows, and Murray is unhappy in her marriage. The spectator is left wondering if their desire stems from their current confused situation, their risky choice of life partners, or both. The former appears remorseful, while the latter fears becoming that way. Murray was one of four Academy Award nominees for the picture, including Best Actor.
The Spotless Mind’s Eternal Sunshine (2004)
Jim Carrey has never shied away from taking chances. He departed from the immensely popular television program In Living Color in 1994 to work on the originally derided Ace Ventura: Pet Detective [8], which eventually made over $100 million. As a highly repressed children’s television legend, he most recently featured in the experimental Showtime series Kidding. In between, he transformed from humor to drama, solidifying his reputation as a versatile actor. Carrey escapes the boundaries of an unknowing, round-the-clock reality show in the 1998 Truman Show. Carrey then starred as controversial comic Andy Kaufmann in the 1999 film Man on the Moon. The comedy in both movies allowed Carrey to wade into dramatic waters instead of diving headfirst. That changed with the release of the science fiction drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004, which starred Carrey as Joel Barish, a depressed introvert who, along with his eccentric ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet), undergoes a novel procedure that erases their memories of each other. The film’s most stunning scenes show a comatose Carrey in the middle of the procedure, trying to save Winslet’s memories as a machine gradually erases them. “How many scars is love really worth?” is the main query.is left vaguely unanswered in a film that masterfully lands on a cinematic balancing act, offering no tidy conclusions in a way that still pleases viewers. The film rightfully has a 93% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Top 10 Things We’ve Learned From Watching Comedy Shows

All Things Must Go (2010)
Drawing inspiration from the short story “Why Don’t You Dance?The 2010 movie, which starred Will Ferrell as a struggling alcoholic, may be the most glaring addition to this list given its star’s almost total focus on comedy. The film turned out to be a minor setback in Ferrell’s career, more of an exception than a shift to more tragic roles. Everything Must Go was a hazardous project as an extreme outlier in Ferrell’s filmography, especially given its “Cast Away”-like tendency to feature Ferrell alone on screen for extended periods of time. The idea of watching Ferrell swig beers on a trash-strewn lawn for ninety minutes after being fired and kicked out by his wife on the same day seems like a recipe for failure to someone accustomed to slapstick humor—drunken streaking [10], crashing racecars, and newscaster royal rumbles [11]—but it worked. In a scene where the audience knows a joke isn’t coming, Ferrell, who is middle-aged, depressed, and inebriated, hits a chord unlike any other character in his career to date: melancholy, morose, and dumbfounded. Due to Ferrell’s traditionally humorous reputation, the ordinary moviegoer found it difficult to absorb the well-made film, as evidenced by the 20% discrepancy between critical acclaim (73%), and audience enthusiasm (53%).
(2011) Moneyball
“What on earth is WARP?”It stands for Wins Against Replacement Players, a metrics-era baseball statistic,” Keith Olbermann quipped mockingly in The 10th Inning, Ken Burns’ 2010 sequel to his renowned nine-part baseball history documentary. All team sports, including soccer, are increasingly impacted by big data, which tracks and evaluates player performance metrics that were previously unavailable.[13] In 2011, Jonah Hill did a fantastic job portraying one of the statisticians that revolutionized sports. Jonah Hill’s sarcastic delivery and body type were suited for comedic roles, such as supporting parts in Superbad, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Knocked Up. However, in contrast to Brad Pitt’s portrayal of the inventive Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, Hill’s deadpan haughtiness contributes to the mesmerizing effect of metrics. At its core, Moneyball is an underdog drama, telling the true story of how a small-market ballclub assembled consistently successful teams on a shoestring budget. Pitt is perhaps miscast in this picture since he is too clean, young, and attractive to portray an underdog, but Hill does a fantastic job. The movie is about the 2002 season, when the A’s won 20 straight games and qualified for the playoffs despite having a smaller payroll than all but two teams. The data that Hill’s character, Peter Brand, emphasized in player analysis and acquisition is now the norm rather than the exception. Hill, who looks like the type of guy who eats microwaved burritos at his desk while staring at spreadsheets 14 hours a day, assists Pitt in defrauding teams with shrewd trades based on information he alone has discovered. The origins of contemporary professional sports decision-making are demonstrated in Moneyball.

(2012) Django Unchained
Another In Living Color alumnus who might easily have several films on this list is Jamie Foxx. The 2004 movie Ray, which tells the story of Ray Charles, comes in second place in this instance. Although Foxx’s performance in Ray may have been better (and a starker departure from such memorable roles as a ne’er do well named Bunz in the 1997 epic Booty Call), Django Unchained, for which writer/director Quentin Tarantino received a nomination for Best Screenplay, gets my vote as a better film overall. For a director sometimes accused of portraying gory violence simply for violence’s sake, Django Unchained places brutal death matches [17] and shoot ’em up bloodbaths in an entirely appropriate setting: a mid-19th-century American slave plantation. In the end, Django goes plantation hopping to free his wife, a house slave accustomed to being raped by owners and overseers. He is paired with a German bounty hunter, a cleverly developed foreign-born character who recognizes slavery for the degrading immorality that it is. Django’s response: Kill them. Kill them all.[18] Django Unchained is a revenge fantasy with a purpose, delivering Tarantino’s signature brutality more appropriately and adequately than his previous works; hence, the inevitable heap of lifeless and blood-splattering bodies is more triumphant than unnecessary.

The Big Short (2015)
The Big Short is a complex film about a complicated topic: the complex, muddled world of a largely unregulated Wall Street that packages and repackages money-making products until they are purposefully unrecognizable to laymen and oversight officers alike. Steve Carell, who is known for his “affable idiot” roles (Anchorman, The 40-year-old Virgin, The Office), plays the bold but brilliant hedge fund manager Steve Baum in a film that highlights the financial cowboyism that directly contributed to the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession. The film includes explanatory cutaways with non-nerdy celebrities like Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain to make things easier. One of the best scenes is when Carell and a colleague set out to gather information about the origins and scope of a problem at the heart of the impending financial crisis: subprime mortgages, which entice unqualified aspiring homeowners into loans with low (or even no) initial interest before skyrocketing and overwhelming them. Carell’s stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look demonstrates an acting versatility not previously seen from him. “Do people know what they’re purchasing?As two local mortgage brokers arrogantly describe how ignorant (and frequently unemployed) their approved homebuyers are, he asks in frustration. The film, which took home an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, gets its title from Carell and his friends “shorting” the toxic financial products, making a tidy profit by anticipating the impending meltdown.

2019’s Uncut Gems
Another performer who may have two films on this list is Adam Sandler, whose 2002 romance Punch-Drunk Love [19] earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performer. The 2019 thriller Uncut Gems is a more worthy addition for two reasons. The first is that Punk-Drunk Love is a contentious film since many critics consider it to be a romantic comedy. The second is that Sandler’s return to a serious role is especially notable because he produced so many God-awful comedies between 2002 and 2019. Moving from the success of Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer into drama is one thing, but after Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 and 50 First Dates, it’s quite another. In Uncut Gems, Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler and gambling addict in New York City’s Diamond District who is entrusted with recovering an expensive gem he originally bought to pay off his debts. The film is notable for its convoluted plot, which comes apart as Ratner attempts to mend a broken marriage and elude bookies who want to take his money, hurt him, or both. It also has a humorous premise with former basketball star Kevin Garnett [20] playing himself. He insists on keeping the rare black opal diamond that lends the movie its title as good luck, offering Ratner his NBA championship ring as collateral. Ratner immediately starts a slide into dishonesty and foul play by pawning the ring and gambling with the money.