10. Friendship, dir. Andrew DeYoung
Seinfeld mined a lot of comedy about how difficult it was to start new friendships as an adult. "Whoever you have in your life by then, that's who you're going with: you're not interviewing, you're not looking at new applications. 'Sorry, I'm not hiring'." At least for me, I'm not sure if that's true because it isn't like I was ever that great at making or maintaining relationships. (If you're reading this and we haven't talked in ten, twenty, thirty years, it wasn't personal, I'm just not a guy who has the courage to make plans, I'd hang whenever, sorry.) A lot of people tried to join the core Seinfeld group and the unlucky ones ended up dead of letter glue poisoning. What that show didn't mine was the inverse of that situation: there is nothing more than brutal than being the tangent invited into a friend circle. There's inside jokes that you don't know, stories that make no sense if you weren't there, you don't know how aggressive the teasing might be, that weird little guy might be jealous of you(?), please let there be a dog whose love is totally unconditional that we can focus on instead. Maybe we all are better off alone forever instead of trying to suffer.
I know I bring up a lot of horror movies on these lists. Some people can't do it, for me those are easy watches. I'll take a zombie eating people any day of the week - no matter how messy their table manners - over anything that's socially awkward. Friendship was the most physically painful watch of a movie I've experienced in some time. Not since Ingrid Goes West have I given myself a bruise in my thigh from pinching it to try to overcome the 20,000 roentgens per second of cringe. And just like Ingrid Goes West, Friendship a movie about a sociopath's desire to be accepted, to have somebody else's life, while you yourself are completely empty. It got so bad with Friendship at one point that I walked out of the theater and pretended I needed to use the restroom.
Don't ever say I don't let cinema challenge me.
That said, this is the only out-and-out comedy on this list. Friendship has the single best scene of any movie in 2025. I was laughing for a full five minutes after it happened. By this point in the movie, our hero, Craig (Tim Robinson) has already done a thorough job of destroying his life while trying to connect with his cool weatherman neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd). He's tried and failed multiple times to recreate magical moments he had with his buddy before he alienated him, which has resulted in Craig poisoning himself, losing his job, and nearly getting his wife Tami (Kate Mara) killed. Now alone, Craig looks for any meaning at all, any answer, and goes to a drug dealer kid in the back of a phone store, who has some exotic hallucinogenic toad. "It's time for you to touch God", says the kid, before Craig takes a lick.
I won't spoil what he sees. Let's just say that Craig does not find God. In fact, all we see is how utterly empty he is. At the very core of his psychology, in the deepest depths of his soul, there's no beauty, no spirit, nothing special. The totality of Craig amounts to mere mundane daily cravings. He's an incomplete person, a squealing baby desiring milk with no real interest in other humans besides 'this one gives me food'. I don't think any other genre but comedy could manage to so completely destroy its protagonist like this. It's so sad, what else can you do? Laugh your ass off. "The toad ripped me off!" Maybe at the end Craig learns a lesson, maybe he's gained some ability to understand that other people exist, but along the day, he's going to do a lot of damage.
Sure, there is a tragedy in the inability to hang. Tim Robinson, already not superhero movie pretty like Kate Mara or Paul Rudd, has bad posture and can never seem to be comfortable in his body, as if his giant winter coat was a shell and he was a turtle. Everybody has failed to hang at some point in their life. But if you're going to connect with people, it cannot be like this, this parasitic feeding off of their perceived charisma. You can slam into a glass door like an idiot and remember that moment for the rest of your life, the things that flash before your eyes that torture you. Do you truly fear your deepest darkest sins, or what a cringy memory? You don't need the power of hang to be likeable. You need the power of even once having something interesting to say.
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