The best Linda Lavin’s comedy movies

Joey Wellman, an American cartoonist from Cleveland now largely forgotten at home, visits France with his partner Lena to attend an exhibition in Paris about the comic strip (bande dessinée) which features his work. He also hopes to be reconciled with his daughter Elsie who has been a student in Paris for two years, in flight from the American culture of which she sees her father as a typical example. Elsie is naively infatuated with French literature, and is trying to secure an introduction to the brilliant university professor Christian Gauthier, an expert on Flaubert but also an enthusiast for comic books. The meeting of father and daughter goes badly, but Elsie is persuaded to join Joey and Lena for the weekend at the country house of Gauthier's mother, Isabelle. During a comic-themed masquerade party, all of the characters are made to reconsider their present and past relationships.

"A Short History of Decay" tells the story of Nathan Fisher, a thirty-something Brooklyn “hipster” (Greenberg) whose writing career is stalled, much to the chagrin of his ambitious live-in girlfriend, Erika (Chriqui). When she unceremoniously dumps him, Nathan retreats into a depressive funk, not knowing where to turn-- finish the novel? work on the play?-- when he gets a call from his brother in Florida telling him his father has been hospitalized. Racing down to "snowbird" central, Nathan finds his father (Yulin) on the mend (albeit grumpy), and his normally addled mother (Lavin) a bit hazier than usual. His quick visit turns into an extended stay during which he discovers that his aging parents are actually in much better control of their lives than he is. He also meets a woman (Perkins)--his mother's manicurist, no less-- who is the polar opposite of Erika, but who may just be exactly what Nathan needs.

Joe Boyd, an aging Washington Senators fan, would sell his soul for the Senators to beat the New York Yankees and win the pennant. Enter Mr. Applegate, who offers to turn Boyd into Joe Hardy, a powerful young baseball player, in exchange for his soul. When Boyd agrees, he becomes Hardy and leads the Senators on a winning streak. When he starts to miss his wife, though, and questions the deal, Applegate sends temptress Lola into the mix.

When a queer daughter returns home to Las Vegas for a "girls weekend" with her estranged homophobic sister and people-pleasing mother, her gun-toting dad lets it slip that her mother's cancer is back with a vengeance, forcing her to decide whether or not she can rejoin her family.