With Turkington's deft hand, Entertainment methodically deconstructs the world's shallow surfaces.

| Aug 25, 2018

There's a chic emptiness to "Entertainment," undoubtedly, and anti-comedy constructs that may rub the wrong way, but there's also a spiky intelligence at work too, one that engages through the artifice of disengagement and the illusion of "performance."

| Nov 19, 2015

It is not fun, but its confrontational style yields dividends.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 19, 2015

A daring and mainly successful black comedy about a dour and depressive comedian on a dead-end tour of California.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 19, 2015

The Comedian is an ugly man with an ugly soul, and an ugly sense of comedy that at one point literally includes making fart noises for 90 full seconds as he pretends to gun down his silent audience with a soccer trophy.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 13, 2015

Like Hamburger's meta-hacky comedy routine, the film confronts and challenges in order to produce something increasingly rare in American cinema: an active, engaged experience.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 13, 2015

Weirdly compelling if student-y and unfocused ...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 13, 2015

Get with the extreme deadpan tone and long takes, though, and the film feels as brave as it is potentially exasperating.

| Nov 12, 2015

I left this barbed portrait of a cracking-up comic with more than a little respect for its fearless director, Rick Alverson, and his trusting star, Gregg Turkington. You can't deny that they're a match made in heaven.

| Nov 12, 2015

It's a downward spiral that's painful to watch, more pathetic than funny.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 12, 2015

It's a portrait of the comedy tour as odyssey of madness, a plummet into the abyss.

| Original Score: B | Nov 12, 2015

[Gregg Turkington gives] a magnetic lead turn that, like the rest of the provocative action, is designed to repulse.

| Nov 11, 2015

You know the way you can walk out after even a thoughtful, accomplished drama - and then never think of it again? Entertainment will stain you, grub you up, maybe ruin your week.

| Nov 10, 2015

Entertainment completely owns the mundane, and gives it a new name.

| Nov 9, 2015

[Entertainment] offers a fascinating look at the tension between personal aspirations and the harsh realities holding them back.

| Original Score: A- | Nov 9, 2015

The film is both jagged and suave, like an orchestrated concept album by a garage band.

| Nov 9, 2015

Turkington's frozen mask of disgust and detachment somehow manages to suggest someone just before and just after being punched.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 4, 2015

Despite its apparently sincere identification with its protagonist, Entertainment feels like a sick joke.

| Oct 26, 2015

It's what new films ought to strive for: to strike back against the familiar.

| Mar 18, 2015

It conjures a menacing perspective on how the titular occupation hulls out empathy and cultivates a particularly unsettling strain of cynicism.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 15, 2015