Meanwhile, he offers droll and tangy glimpses behind the scenes, contrasting the threadbare production of knockabout comedies and the richly appointed melodrama sets.

Simpson also said that this film is more of a knockabout comedy than the Melanie Griffith starrer, which was a drama genre movie.

Necessarily some of this is nihilistic knockabout comedy, and some of it is overtly casual commentary.

The appallingly swift transition from knockabout comedy to a bleak and unsparing depiction of the consequences of youthful nihilism is masterful and extremely affecting.

It's no surprise, alas, that Mr. Muniz and Ms. Bynes seem considerably smarter than the frantic knockabout comedy in which they find themselves trapped.

A tongue-in-cheek combination of knockabout comedy and Synge-style dialogue.

In one of Mr. Bishop's defter moments, after two hours of knockabout comedy and jack-in-the-box homicide, she calmly announces, "I can't work in this environment."

Buenos Aires and Kyoto started out as an obsession and have now turned into a knockabout comedy.

"Jurassic Park 3" is often a literal knockabout comedy, with Ms. Leoni sporting a bruise on her cheek that looks like a heart.

Critics with over-delicate modern sensibilities will be shocked to learn that a 17th-century observer remembered The Fairy Queen as Bottom the Weaver, a knockabout comedy with lots of music.