The best Brent Carver’s comedy movies

A feminine take on a Cassavetes drama, the film focuses on a group of women who have gathered for a surprise baby shower. However, as the female guests arrive (the household males having adjourned to an afternoon football game), the off-screen mother-to-be goes into premature labour, leaving the bored invitees to sip spiked punch and discuss the dearth of available men until the drunken boys return home, thus setting the stage for male/female confrontations, confessions and clumsy acts of copulation-notably while standing under a shower. An exploration of the contemporary trappings of male/female sexual politics.

Brent Carver stars as the swashbuckling Pirate King in the famous Stratford Festival's rollicking production of the Gilbert & Sullivan classic that pits British bobbles against unlikely pirates on the Cornish coast. Sullivan regarded this operetta - a hit ever since its first production in New York in 1879 - as the best comedy he composed. He even said of his collaborator, "The libretto is ingenious, clever, wonderfully fun in parts and sometimes brilliant in dialogue - beautifully written for music, as is all Gilbert does." Indeed, audiences will find the music every bit a match for the lyrics, with the genius of the score lying in its parody of grand opera. Filmed in 1985 at the world-famous Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.