A “sleeper” is an otherwise unheralded, usually small budget film that is so good it overcomes its lack of studio advertising budget with its slap-in-the-face quality. Here’s a few of my recent favorites in this category:

“Waking Ned Devine” (1998) has no actors whose names are familiar and is set in Ireland, filmed on the Isle of Man. In the tiny village of Tullymore, two old friends discover that one of their neighbors has won the lottery so they set out to discover who it is. They find an old fisherman, Ned Devine, still in his easy chair in front of the telly, the winning ticket clutched in his dead hand. The hilarity involves their subsequent efforts to deceive the lottery people into paying out the winnings of $6.9 million Irish pounds, a deceit that must of necessity involve the entire village though one old biddy refuses to cooperate. There are some absolutely wonderful scenes and all the human interest subplots dovetail wonderfully into the grand denouement.

“Everything is Illuminated” (2005) is another comedy/drama with no recognizable actors. From the novel by Jonathan Foer, it involves a young Jewish man who travels to the Ukraine to seek information about the woman in his grandfather’s life before the Nazis destroyed their town in W.W. II. He hires a guide service which includes a young hip-hop obsessed translator who is hysterical and his grandfather who is the driver, notwithstanding that he claims to be blind. Along for the ride is the grandfather’s “seeing-eye bitch,” a dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. (not a typo). The trip sheds light upon and affects all their lives.

“Big Trouble” (2002), from the novel by Dave Barry, is filled with recognizable actors, what you might call an ensemble farce, including Tim Allen, Rene Russo, Stanley Tucci, Dennis Farina, & Tom Sizemore. I rank this as one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. The basic plot involves the attempts by two hitmen to whack Tucci, but their efforts compete with various comic subplots (the Russian mob, a nuclear bomb, two confused cops, an unusual pair of FBI men, a teenager with a life-like squirt gun, & two dim-witted petty crooks). It is mayhem in Miami, filled with running jokes and goofy characters.

“Assassin in Love” (2008) is delightful black humor, a story about a professional assassin who fails to complete a job and gets targeted himself. He goes to Wales and hides out pretending to be a baker. He falls for a local gal but the village residents figure out his former profession and begin to seek more than his baking services. Meanwhile, the hit man assigned to get him tracks him down. A great cast of unknowns and the funniest sex scene I’ve ever seen (in the bakery).

“Leaves of Grass” (2010) is Edward Norton at his best. For some reason the film has had only limited release and got lukewarm reviews, but I found Norton’s tour de force performance as twins hilarious. Norton plays Bill Kincaid, an Ivy League philosophy prof, and his twin Brady Kincaid, a redneck pot purveyor in Oklahoma. Whoever edited this flick did a great job creating the appearance that the two brothers are interacting in scene after scene. Norton, who has always had an undertone of smarminess in his roles, outdoes himself here. Juxtaposition of Bill’s philosophical problem-posing with real-life’s messy unpredictability make for interesting contrast when the scruffy pot-seller lures the prof back home to serve as his alibi. Then, when things go awry, they really go awry.