2011 · Paul Feig · 125 min · Comedy
A sharp, raunchy, and genuinely moving comedy that proved women could carry a gross-out comedy just as well as men, anchored by Kristen Wiig's fearlessly honest performance.
2018 · Jon M. Chu · 120 min · Romance / Comedy
Crazy Rich Asians revived the big-studio romantic comedy by staging it as an event, an economics professor discovering her boyfriend is Singapore's most eligible heir, then walking into a family, a wedding, and a mahjong duel that treat love as a merger requiring board approval. Michelle Yeoh's gatekeeping matriarch gives the genre its best antagonist in decades, the Singapore spectacle earns the crazy and the rich, and the film's cultural milestone status was matched, rarely for milestones, by its craft. The plot runs the genre's oldest rails and the satire adores what it teases. The wedding still stuns, and the mahjong scene is canon.
2020 · Lucy Foley · 320 pages · Fiction / Thriller
The Guest List strands a magazine-perfect wedding on a storm-lashed Irish island and runs the classic locked-room formula with a modern structural twist, the victim's identity withheld as long as the killer's. Lucy Foley rotates five narrators, bride, plus-one, best man, wedding planner, bridesmaid, each nursing secrets that converge on one body in the dark, and the book's atmosphere, peat bogs, gull screams, champagne curdling into menace, carries its bestseller momentum honestly. The characters run archetypal and the reveals stack coincidence high. As a one-sitting storm read, though, it does exactly what the cover promises, and book clubs devoured it for good reason.