Here Are The 15 Finest Satire Movies You Can Watch Right Now:
Satires are common in movies, and when done right, they can make strong social statements. This is a trick that the best comedy movies use in a way that doesn’t hit you over the head but still gets their point across.
Using irony as well as exaggeration to show how silly the world is, satire blows up real life, such as a parade balloon, till it bursts from all of its own inconsistencies. Like a funhouse mirror, satire makes fun of the world we live in and shows us how frustrating and unfair things really are. This is what makes humor different from other types of comedy.
In comedies, the goal is to make you laugh. But humor can make you feel anything from relieved to furious. They can be indirect and arch, or they can be so over the top that they almost yell at you. When it works best, the genre is sharp, changes things, and is very important.
A lot of satirical movies are funny, but that doesn’t mean they’re all comedies. Satire can look at sensitive or controversial topics while still taking them seriously. If you look at some other humorous movies, they get a lot sillier and might even be more like parody movies.
Triangle Of Sadness:
The movies that Ruben Ostlund is best known for are his satirical comedies. These films were so well received that they won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The first was the strange 2017 movie The Square. The second was the 2022 movie Triangle of Sadness, which was a little easier to understand.
This movie has some of the same ideas about money and class fighting as 2019’s Parasite, but it makes fun of the majority of its characters instead of making them seem like real people. Perhaps this makes it even more sarcastic than Parasite, which is also highly acclaimed, despite Parasite potentially being a more intricate film overall.
Still, Triangle of Sadness is entertaining with its strange story about a series of wild events that affect everyone on a luxury ship. It is also a direct attack on the richest people in society. Although some viewers may be able to separate themselves from the cartoon characters, the movie remains funny and enjoyable to watch.
District 9:
It’s easy for comedies to poke fun at things in real life, so a lot of parody movies are comedies. That’s not one of those movies, though. This is District 9. It instead sends a very direct message regarding apartheid within South Africa.
This 2009 movie by writer and director Neil Blomkamp doesn’t separate people based on skin color. Instead, the lower-class people are a race of aliens. People in the movie think the aliens are dirty, weak, and a burden on society. They even have their own racial slurs.
Wikus van der Merve, the primary human character, has an accident that turns him from a famous government official into one of the aliens. This process takes time, and the movie shows how people treat him differently once they think he is “one of them.”
The Lobster:
Institutions that look down on us from high up on peaks of nonsense, like politics, bureaucracy, and all your favorite “isms,” are often the target of great humor. But we’ll get to those later.
To begin, we always like to start with a whimper to get people’s attention. That’s why we’ll first take a close look at those satires that stick their fingers in the very core of our relationships.
The Lobster is our favorite parody of this type. Other movies like City of Women, Wild Grass, Love at the Top, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Divorce Italian Style also poke fun at how we love each other.
Yorgos Lanthimos, the director, presents older spinsters and single people with a final opportunity to find love or choose to be transformed into any animal they desire, allowing them to live out their days. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, makes it clear what he thought of the pressures that come with marriage.
With a comedic tone that is as dark and wry as it gets, his breakthrough film takes a dry look at the pressures of marriage in society, with not even a smile to show that he finds it funny.
In the direct, on-the-nose conversation that is his specialty, his characters talk about every bit of subtext while facing the physical and strange version of the danger of not fitting in, which is generally a metaphor.
Don’t Look Up:
Adam McKay, who writes and directs movies, started out making broad comedies before going on to Vice and The Big Short, which are both tongue-in-cheek docudramas. In 2021, he made the most famous movie about an asteroid coming toward Earth since Deep Impact, as well as Armageddon in 1998. This movie was a full-on spoof.
But instead of the cool and controlled reaction from the government within Deep Impact or even the exciting and brave space mission in Armageddon, the world quickly falls into a familiar chaos in Don’t Look Up.
A big part of the people in McKay’s lively comedy refuse to even look for the asteroid because they think it’s fake because they’ve seen too many YouTube videos about it.
A tech mogul tells the government that rather than embarking on a mission to wipe out the asteroid, they should try to mine it for minerals. This is another example of how private money taints the effort to save humanity.
The government doesn’t care about our brave scientists, and media attention makes them do bad things. It all feels like it’s going to end as surely as climate change. “Don’t Look Up” was a rallying cry for a world that has its head buried in the sand.
Tampopo:
Tampopo was a very strange film, yet if it were a regular movie, it probably wouldn’t have gotten the kind of praise and cult following it did and still has. It is a well-known Japanese comedy about food, with many smaller stories and characters that sometimes interact and sometimes go their separate ways.
But the main plot of this movie revolves around two truck drivers who help a woman turn her roadside fast food place into a famous noodle shop and restaurant. It’s impossible to watch Tampopo without getting hungry, but it’s also impossible to watch it without having a good time as well as finding it mostly very funny.
As opposed to the more common Spaghetti Western, it makes fun of a lot of Western movie tropes and became famous for calling itself a “Ramen Western.” People who don’t know much about Japanese culture might miss many of the other humorous references, but Tampopo is still funny and unique, no matter what.
Attack The Block:
One of these movies that doesn’t get enough attention is Attack the Block, a sci-fi comedy horror movie that came out in 2011. It made John Boyega as well as Jodie Whittaker big stars, and it was also a smart piece of British social comedy from director Joe Cornish.
In short, the film is about a small group of bad guys in South London who have to protect their block from an alien attack. As the movie goes on, though, it becomes clear that the characters are just lost young boys who are trying to fit in with their peers as well as their crime bosses.
They are also hailed as heroes for safeguarding their neighborhood. Of course, when the cops finally arrive, they don’t understand what’s going on and arrest the wrong people automatically. This piece offers insightful social analysis on the portrayal of teens and urban life. Also, it has scary aliens with hair, making for an awesome mix.
Network:
We switch to a topic that has nothing to do with relationships or the media, but we say it sounds like it does because we couldn’t think of a better way to start.
Media satires have made fun of fandoms within Galaxy Quest as well as celebrities in general in movies such as Meet John Doe, The King of Comedy, and Natural Born Killers. But our favorite media satires look at the news media, and Network, our ninth choice, is right in that group.
The network is like a screaming tea kettle in the boiler room of a nuclear reactor, going supercritical as it digs into the hollow soul of the media machine. It’s very different from The Lobster’s cold, distant tone. Sidney Lumet turns Paddy Chayefsky’s series of increasingly intense speeches into a huge movie.
Changing them into the weight of a whole news industry comes together to form a fist that can be used to beat reality into submission so that it acts in a way that is worth reporting on. And the reporting that comes out of it rings truer every day.
Sorry To Bother You:
“Sorry to Bother You,” Boots Riley’s first full-length movie as a director, has a simple hook. Cash Green has a hard time making ends meet until he gets a job calling people. David Cross gives him a “white voice” that his friend tells him to use when talking to people. Cash starts to succeed right away, far beyond anyone’s hopes.
It goes against so many deep ideas regarding race, language, and speech that it could make a movie by itself. However, “Sorry to Bother You” is just beginning. We quickly find out that Cash’s new business also handles deals for guns and is a branch of WorryFree, a company similar to Amazon that forces people to work for free.
His coworkers start a union and a protest, but it doesn’t take long for the protests to blend in with Cash’s girlfriend’s strange performance art shows. It’s like a Thomas Pynchon book gone crazy.
“Sorry to Bother You” presents half-horse, half-human creatures and the general collapse of society before you know it. The song “Sorry to Bother You” is a fiery tribute to the noise and quick gratification of the digital age.
They Live:
You might consider John Carpenter a horror director, since his two most famous movies, Halloween and The Thing, are both horror movies. But he’s also a lot more than simply a director who loves scaring people.
As an example, “They Live” is an exciting movie that mixes action, horror, science fiction, humor, and comedy. It’s kind of like an alien attack movie that’s unlike any other. The show They Live is about a guy named John Nada who is homeless and finds a pair of sunglasses that help him see the truth regarding the world around him.
Furthermore, the sunglasses reveal hidden messages that people encounter daily, exposing them as transmissions from aliens seeking to manipulate humanity. It’s both unbelievable and interesting to think about; it’s a strong attack on the media and world powers, but it’s also a lot of fun and full of exciting action.
Borat:
The full title of this movie was Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for the Glory of the Nation of Kazakhstan. That’s too long, though, so we’ll cut it down for the remainder of this post.
One of Sacha Baron Cohen’s most famous alter egos is Borat, who is said to be a TV reporter from Kazakhstan trying to learn about the modern world. Borat makes fun of the country he was supposed to be investigating by making a figure who is so innocent it’s funny, and the audience is in on the joke too.
He shows some of the dirtiest parts of America, like racism, sexism, and just plain stupidity. But a lot of people want to help this foreigner learn about the great things about America.
In this way, the movie also shows how kind Americans are, even though they have some problems. Cohen never breaks character and often makes jokes way too far with his co-stars, who don’t know what’s going on. This makes Borat a satire of reality TV as a whole.
The Player:
Hollywood enjoys making fun of itself even more than it loves making fun of its little brother TV. That’s just the right amount of putting yourself down to justify an hour, as well as a half of pure vanity.
The Player, a spoof by Robert Altman, takes the top spot in this category. Singin’ in the Rain teases in the kindest, most caring way, and Sunset Boulevard dresses it in its finest noir clothes.
The Player starts with an iconic eight-minute take that sets up the whole story and the movie’s self-referential frame. It’s Altman’s heartfelt love letter to the movie business that made him famous, ate him up, spit him out, and finally asked him back for more.
Tim Robbins plays an ambitious studio executive who wants to find a writer he thinks is sending him unwanted letters before he kills the writer by accident. Celebrity visits make the line between real life and make-believe even less clear in the land of make-believe, which only gets less clear from there.
There may not be another director better suited to make a witty attack on his entire business than Altman does in The Player, which is a true gem.
Jojo Rabbit:
There may not be a more likeable actor alive today than Taika Waititi. He is so much fun to watch as Korg within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and as a vampire in the first What We Do in the Shadows. All of the movies he directs have the same warm tone.
So, making fun of himself by dressing up as Hitler is a great piece of satire in and of itself. Waititi plays the tyrant in the Oscar-winning movie Jojo Rabbit as a made-up friend of the movie’s main character, Jojo, who is 10 years old and a devoted Hitler Youth member.
“Jojo Rabbit” breathes new life into the subject of World War II, offering a fresh and entertaining perspective through Waititi’s portrayal of a simple yet captivating Hitler. It’s pretty clear how the story will go Jojo makes friends with a Jewish girl that his mother has hidden within their house.
But “Jojo Rabbit” takes some unexpected turns and ends on a really sad note. What Waititi does with Hitler is so ridiculous that it creates a sense of security, thereby facilitating the film’s heartbreak. And boy, does it break your heart to make you laugh out loud?
