Every dark comedy movie streaming on Criterion Channel in the US right now — 30 films ranked by rating, checked against Criterion Channel’s live catalog.
Updated September 2026 · Availability refreshed from Criterion Channel US
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
✦ MovieMuse AI takeChaplin's final monologue inverts slapstick tyranny into sincere humanism, making fascism's absurdity the vehicle for tragedy.
Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
✦ MovieMuse AI takeLubitsch's greatest weapon: making Nazi occupation hilarious through theatrical absurdity and moral inversion.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier's efforts to track down a German spy.
Directed by Luis Buñuel
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBuñuel transforms social collapse into absurdist nightmare, weaponizing etiquette against itself as civilization crumbles within a dining room.
After a lavish dinner party, the guests find themselves unable to depart... and, over the next few days, all of their elaborate societal pretenses and façades deteriorate as they are reduced to living like animals.
Directed by Juraj Herz
✦ MovieMuse AI takeThe film's grotesque logic—that cremation offers salvation—becomes horrifying prophecy, pairing bureaucratic evil with sincere spiritual delusion.
In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.
Directed by Pietro Germi
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCefalù's baroque scheming to orchestrate his wife's murder exposes how patriarchal desperation becomes absurdist farce when law and desire collide.
Ferdinando Cefalù is desperate to marry his cousin, Angela, but he is married to Rosalia and divorce is illegal in Italy. To get around the law, he tries to trick his wife into having an affair so he can catch her and murder her, as he knows he would be given a light sentence for killing an adulterous woman. He persuades a painter to lure his wife into an affair, but Rosalia proves to be more faithful than he expected.
Directed by Jūzō Itami
✦ MovieMuse AI takeRamen obsession treated with operatic reverence undercuts its own earnestness, finding cosmic humor in culinary passion's ridiculousness.
In this humorous paean to the joys of food, a pair of truck drivers happen onto a decrepit roadside shop selling ramen noodles. The widowed owner, Tampopo, begs them to help her turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle-soup making". Interspersed are satirical vignettes about the importance of food to different aspects of human life.
Directed by Luis García Berlanga
✦ MovieMuse AI takeMacabre inheritance comedy hinges on the executioner's daughter as unwitting transmitter of occupational dread across generations.
An undertaker gets married to an old executioner's daughter and, although he doesn't like it, must continue the profession of his father-in-law after his retirement.
Directed by Federico Fellini
✦ MovieMuse AI takeAmarcord's fascist-era Italy dissolves into dreamlike vignettes where historical darkness and adolescent absurdity occupy the same sardonic space.
In an Italian seaside town, young Titta gets into trouble with his friends and watches various local eccentrics as they engage in often absurd behavior. Frequently clashing with his stern father and defended by his doting mother, Titta witnesses the actions of a wide range of characters, from his extended family to Fascist loyalists to sensual women, with certain moments shifting into fantastical scenarios.
Directed by Hal Ashby
✦ MovieMuse AI takeJuxtaposing obsessive death-fantasies with anarchic life-celebration creates comedy's darkest emotional paradox—funeral humor as existential rebellion.
A deadpan young man obsessed with death meets an eccentric septuagenarian who teaches him to live life to the fullest.
Directed by Federico Fellini
✦ MovieMuse AI takeVitelloni's aimless drifting mutes expected tragedy into resigned comedy—these young men fail so gently we laugh at destiny's indifference.
Five young men dream of success as they drift lazily through life in a small Italian village. Fausto, the group's leader, is a womanizer; Riccardo craves fame; Alberto is a hopeless dreamer; Moraldo fantasizes about life in the city; and Leopoldo is an aspiring playwright. As Fausto chases a string of women, to the horror of his pregnant wife, the other four blunder their way from one uneventful experience to the next.
Directed by Jacques Tati
✦ MovieMuse AI takeTati's slapstick becomes philosophical critique: modernist architecture and gadgetry don't liberate but rather humiliate the human body.
Clumsy Monsieur Hulot finds himself perplexed by the intimidating complexity of a gadget-filled Paris. He attempts to meet with a business contact but soon becomes lost. His roundabout journey parallels that of an American tourist, and as they weave through the inventive urban environment, they intermittently meet, developing an interest in one another. They eventually get together at a chaotic restaurant, along with several other quirky characters.
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
✦ MovieMuse AI takeChaplin's casual monstrosity—a serial killer banker treated as mundane entrepreneur, scoring dark laughs through bureaucratic evil.
The film is about an unemployed banker, Henri Verdoux, and his sociopathic methods of attaining income. While being both loyal and competent in his work, Verdoux has been laid-off. To make money for his wife and child, he marries wealthy widows and then murders them. His crime spree eventually works against him when two particular widows break his normal routine.
Directed by Luis Buñuel
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBuñuel stages theological debate as slapstick seduction, where the Devil's temptations are mundanely comic but spiritually devastating.
Simon, a deeply religious man living in the 4th century, wants to be nearer to God so he climbs a column. The Devil wants him come down to Earth and is trying to seduce him.
Directed by Luis García Berlanga
✦ MovieMuse AI takeCharitable performance art exposes bourgeois hypocrisy through forced intimacy; kindness becomes grotesque theater.
In a small Spanish town, during the Christmas holidays, a group of rich old ladies organize a peculiar event that consists of inviting a homeless person to sit down to dinner at their wealthy table. Plácido, a humble worker, is hired by the organizers to participate in a parade with his three-wheeled vehicle, a seemingly simple mission that will not be easy for him to accomplish.
Directed by Luis Buñuel
✦ MovieMuse AI takeSurrealist vignettes refuse narrative logic entirely, collapsing cause-and-effect until meaning itself becomes the joke.
This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.
Directed by Martin Scorsese
✦ MovieMuse AI takeScorsese traps his protagonist in ever-escalating nightmare where New York becomes a recursive gauntlet of sexual and social humiliation.
Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman.
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHulot's wordless incomprehension of modernity creates comic pathos—suburban aspiration collides with humane chaos.
Polish immigrant Karol Karol finds himself out of a marriage, a job and a country when his French wife, Dominique, divorces him after six months due to his impotence. Forced to leave France after losing the business they jointly owned, Karol enlists fellow Polish expatriate Mikołaj to smuggle him back to their homeland.
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
✦ MovieMuse AI takeJarmusch's deadpan trio defies prison-escape conventions, treating their predicament with existential cool rather than dramatic urgency.
A disc jockey, a pimp and an Italian tourist escape from jail in New Orleans.
Directed by Mike Leigh
✦ MovieMuse AI takeLeigh's misogynist protagonist spews nihilist ranting while the film quietly demolishes his worldview through accumulated cruelty.
An unemployed Brit vents his rage on unsuspecting strangers as he embarks on a nocturnal London odyssey.
Directed by Jacques Tati
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHulot's silent physical comedy exposes consumerism's emptiness through bumbling grace, finding tragedy in mechanical living.
Genial, bumbling Monsieur Hulot loves his top-floor apartment in a grimy corner of the city, and cannot fathom why his sister's family has moved to the suburbs. Their house is an ultra-modern nightmare, which Hulot only visits for the sake of stealing away his rambunctious young nephew. Hulot's sister, however, wants to win him over to her new way of life, and conspires to set him up with a wife and job.
Directed by Jiří Menzel
✦ MovieMuse AI takeWartime backdrop renders adolescent lust absurdly trivial, then brutally relevant—virgin and fascism collapse into single symbolic act.
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.
Directed by Alberto Lattuada
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHonor-bound murder becomes punch line when provincial ritual collides with modern rationality; duty devours decency.
When a good-natured factory supervisor living in Milan with his Northern wife returns to his native Sicily, a decades' old oath forces him to fulfill a nightmarish obligation.
Directed by Bruce Robinson
✦ MovieMuse AI takeWithnail's magnificent desperation; unemployment becomes cosmic tragedy wrapped in quotable drunken philosophy and withering British wit.
Two out-of-work actors -- the anxious, luckless Marwood and his acerbic, alcoholic friend, Withnail -- spend their days drifting between their squalid flat, the unemployment office and the pub. When they take a holiday "by mistake" at the country house of Withnail's flamboyantly gay uncle, Monty, they encounter the unpleasant side of the English countryside: tedium, terrifying locals and torrential rain.
Directed by Roy Andersson
✦ MovieMuse AI takeHellstrom's static frames force viewers to excavate meaning from gridlocked mediocrity—traffic jam as existential metaphor.
A monumental traffic jam serves as the backdrop for the lives of the inhabitants of a Swedish city.
Directed by Aki Kaurismäki
✦ MovieMuse AI takeKaurismäki's deadpan despair: factory drudgery and romance dissolve into infant drowning, tenderness weaponized as punchline.
Iris is a shy and dowdy young woman stuck in a dead-end job at a match factory, who dreams of finding love at the local dancehall. Finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand and abandoned by the father, Iris finally decides the time has come to get even and she begins to plot her revenge.
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
✦ MovieMuse AI takeBellocchio stages matricide as gentle mercy-killing; fratricidal love becomes the film's moral center and blackest joke.
A deeply disturbed and epileptic young man benignly decides to murder other members of his dysfunctional family for altruistic reasons.
Directed by Louis Malle
✦ MovieMuse AI takeMalle permits incestuous consummation as comedic coming-of-age milestone, normalizing taboo through bourgeois nostalgia.
This loosely plotted coming-of-age tale follows the life of 15-year-old Laurent Chevalier as he stumbles his way over the burgeoning swell of adolescence in 1950s France. After having his first sexual experience with a prostitute and dodging the lips of a priest, Chevalier contracts a case of scarlet fever. When the fever leaves him with a heart murmur, Chevalier is placed in a sanatorium, along with his over-attentive and adulterous mother.
Directed by Nagisa Ōshima
✦ MovieMuse AI takeOshima's execution misfires; state machinery's embarrassment becomes anarchic commentary on institutional incompetence and dignity.
A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.
Directed by Sacha Guitry
✦ MovieMuse AI takeChevalier's witty self-narration reframes moral corruption as charming autobiography—the scoundrel rewrites history as entertainment.
Life story of a charming scoundrel, with little dialogue other than the star/director's witty narration. As a boy, only he survives a family tragedy when he's deprived of supper (poisonous mushrooms!) for stealing...concluding that dishonesty pays. Through years of dabbling in crime and amusing adventures, two women appear and reappear in his life, a dazzling blonde jewel thief and a stunning brunette gambler. Finally, he meets the mysterious Charbonnier who had saved his life in World War I, leading to the surprising next phase in his career...
Directed by Pierre Étaix
✦ MovieMuse AI takeGodard's yoyo philosophy: wealth and poverty become interchangeable carnival acts, capitalism revealed as pure slapstick.
The story follows the son of a millionaire from the 1920s to the 1960s. After losing his fortune in the stock-exchange crash, he teams up with an equestrienne and becomes a circus clown.
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