Popular reviews

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 4

  Nobody but Turkington could have pulled this off.
  Or should I say Neil Hamburger.

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  Review by Cindy T ★★★★½ 4

  Rick Alverson’s Entertainment is a film that is sure to divide viewers. Its nameless antihero (Gregg Turkington) is a character that will turn off many viewers. However, if you’re like me, a lover of mutts and misfits, you will find him to be a sympathetic character whose loneliness and sadness affect you.

  Entertainment is an anti-road trip story about The Comedian (Turkington), who travels the lonely roads of the Mojave Desert in California performing his comedy act in depressing venues, including a prison, a roadside show, and dive bars. The story is an anti-road trip one because he loses himself instead of finds himself on the trip.

  The Comedian’s only companion is Eddie (Tye Sheridan), a young man who performs…

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  Review by LunchEnjoyer ★★★★½ 1

  this is a movie about a weird guy

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★ 1

  ENTERTAINMENT confirms that Rick Alverson is one of the most vital and necessary filmmakers in American indie cinema.

  MY FULL REVIEW ON LITTLE WHITE LIES: www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/features/articles/sundance-2015-entertainment-29059

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★ 5

  37/100

  Considering my fondness for Rick Alverson's The Comedy, I was disappointed by the rampant art-house cliches and plodding uneasiness of Entertainment; a particularly unsympathetic montage of a circular lifestyle and the light that rotates around an endless vacuum of nothing. To be honest, I was never drawn into the life of Gregg Turkington's "successful" portrayal of a nameless comedian. I didn't feel for him. I didn't care about him. I didn't even pity him. And while such an annoying and infuriating character should be interesting at the very least, he wasn't. Alverson is trying to say *something* here about the cost of low-life fame not discovered and the expense of ego within an empty body of flesh, but it…

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  Review by Mike Ginn

  I agree with every rating of this movie. 1/2 star? Absolutely. Five star? Couldn’t agree more

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  Review by Blain LaMotta ★★★★ 8

  I don't know about anyone else, but I found The Comedian's stand-up routines in this to be painfully hysterical. The way he shifts into another persona to momentarily escape from his lonely, soul crushingly banal existence, only for that persona to negatively protrude on his original reality becomes an almost cosmic joke of Biblical proportions. There really is no retreating from your own mind in this vast wasteland we call life. Wherever you go, you always run into a reminder of what you are running from. Even when The Comedian goes to sleep, his subconscious offers no respite, but only more suffering. So what does The Comedian do when he can't take it anymore? He resorts to the only thing he knows deep down that can make sense of his everlasting burden of despair: to laugh at himself.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★ 2

  Thought the guy's act was pretty hilarious. Would've been up for just watching that.

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus]

  why performative misogyny as a function of cishet male self-loathing?

  *epic nihilism vs. abject nihilism a function of analog vs digital recording, storage and playback / perceived expenditure, weighted vs weightless.\

  ersatz meaninglessness a signifier we tried to care but not really it is too much work. everything replaced by its instead of, a regression that eventually wanders. the land is boringer once everything we tried to kill we did, grayer, a run for machines until the machines break and we leave them where they fall why else is the land so flat so gray so cracked and riven. the american west as an emptied expanse was a lot of labor a lot of murder a lot of poison it…

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  Review by sprizzle ★★★★½

  We are in the mojave. The light is washed out, desaturated to the point of turning Greg Turknington white like a ghost. Wind chimes play crystal tunes and hang somewhere just off screen. The stage is set and Neil Hamburger walks out.

  Comedians set off into the desert to make art. I love this group of filmmakers. Pushing comedy past the point of being funny. This movie has no place being called a dark comedy. Black comedy doesn't even really get there. The setting should give you a good visual of the tone. Sparse. Outlook on life for this traveling comedian isn't looking great. We follow him on a slow path across the west into Los Angeles. Swinging into dive…

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  Review by russman ★★★½ 5

  Reese's Pieces are now ruined for me

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  Review by Esther Rosenfield

  A perfectly paced descent from realism to expressionism. What starts as a washed-out-looking film becomes dominated by bright primary colors. Shots are totally awash in individual colors. I can't wait to watch it again to track the shift between modes.

  It's also very funny and very sad. This is about a comedian who begins every joke by repeatedly shouting "WHY?", so there's an existential dread looming over every frame.

  After The Look of Silence this is the clear highlight of the festival (so far).