Best comedies of 2025 (so far)

An R-rated caper with an urban setting and two extremely likeable leads? What is this, 1995? Indeed, One of Them Days is something of a throwback, but it’s less a nostalgic retread than an example of the kind of crowd-pleasing hangout comedy that never should’ve become so rare in the first place. The ever-reliable Keke Palmer and R&B star SZA, in her acting debut, exude Wayne-and-Garth-level chemistry as lifelong friends scrambling to come up with rent money and falling into deeper, and far more dangerous, debt over the course of a few eventful hours. Seriously, put them in everything – and bring Katt Williams along, too.

Sure, it’s no Paddington 2 and the decision to transport the Browns and their bear from London to South America lends this threequel a slightly generic quality, but there’s plenty of good-natured giggles in the family-iest family film of 2025 so far. Vying with Antonio Banderas’s pompous riverboat capital for MVP is Olivia Colman as a suspiciously gleeful nun with a touch of the Julie Andrews. Not that the little bear doesn’t deliver laughs of his own: one series of Chaplinesque mishaps culminates in a riotous rapids run.

Jack Black goes full ‘School of Block’ in a game-to-movie adaptation that’s a) the giant box-office hit no one saw coming, 2) way more entertaining than it has any right to be, and 3) has subjected unsuspecting cinemagoers to the full horror of the ‘Chicken Jockey’ phenomenon (think Alien’s Space Jockey, only more harrowing). You take the rough with the smooth, though, when a comedy is this deranged. Z-ers have been lured back to the multiplex in big numbers to be introduced to the respective greatness of Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa and, in cameo, Matt Berry. 

British stand-up and screenwriter Tim Key leaves Alan Partridge’s Sidekick Simon behind with a comedy that has him playing a lonely lottery winner with a very specific musical dream. He invites his favourite folk musician, Herb McGwyer (co-writer Tom Basden), to his island without telling him that his old musical and romantic partner, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), is also coming. Whatever could go wrong, does go wrong in a gentle but heartfelt comedy that plays like Local Hero and Once singing a duet. A comedy about romance, rather than a romantic comedy, it’s a true charmer.

The final season of Danny McBride’s outrageously profane skewering of for-profit fundamentalism hasn’t felt particularly final, but it has served as a potent reminder of what television is losing. What other show is giving you a Civil War-set mini-movie guest-starring Bradley Cooper, a tragic pole-dancing accident and Walton Goggins hanging brain on a waterski, all in the first three episodes? Plot-wise, it’s more scheming and squabbling from the maniacally self-absorbed Gemstone siblings, this time aimed at John Goodman’s family patriarch and his new lover, played by a fully country-fried Megan Mullally. But honestly, how else would you expect them to go out? 

That old truism about comedy being tragedy plus time counts double in the fourth Bridget Jones movie. Renée Zellweger’s put-upon Londoner, now a mum twice over, is still reeling from the death of her beloved Mark Darcy but Shazzer and the gang are determined to get her back out there. ‘Out there’ being a place where humiliating sexting disaster, heartwarming triumphs and some classic Bridge pratfalls await. Hugh Grant delivers another hilariously wolfish turn as Daniel Cleaver and Emma Thompson steals scenes as Bridget’s slightly annoyed doctor. A treat.

Not so much ‘funny haha’ as ‘funny… sob’, Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-winning road trip movie nonetheless delivers some big laughs as it follows Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin’s estranged cousins David and Benji across Poland on a Holocaust tour. Not on paper a laugh riot, but that jittery odd-couple chemistry and some pinsharp writing translates into big laughs when they’re most needed on this bittersweet exploration of past (and present) trauma.

Seth Rogen is harried Hollywood studio head Matt Remick who finds that his dream job is a hand grenade with the pin removed in this godlike Apple TV comedy series. With a never-more-out-there Bryan Cranston delivering a deviant brand of David Zaslav corporate oversight as the big boss who wants a Kool-Aid corporate partnership turned into a Barbie-alike blockbuster (‘If Warner Bros. can make a billion dollars off the plastic tits of a pussyless doll, we can make two billion dollars!’), Rogen’s Remick and his team (Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders, Kathryn Hahn) desperately try to hold it all together. Sharply observed, relentlessly funny, perfectly cast and often systolic-raisingly stressful to behold, it’s like if the Safdies remade Entourage and it was good. Really, really good.