Critics reviews

It's easy to make a movie that's unpleasant. What's harder is to give that ugliness a sense of urgency. Alverson and Turkington's film is soaked in the kind of flop sweat that leaves a residue—it's like that old joke about Pagliacci told by David Lynch.

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. The restlessness and discomfort are productive.

Entertainment may be the most disturbing movie about a stand-up comedian since Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy... Alverson's style of filmmaking uses a deadpan approach that forces audiences to react to the characters and events being presented. The awkwardness will get under the viewers' skin—if it doesn't get on their nerves.

Why is Entertainment probably the most electrifying work of cinema this year? Control. Alverson subtly manipulates Turkington's environment to reflect the parade of odd stimuli he encounters. Exacting widescreen compositions trap the unfunnyman in his own life as it spins into nightmarish abstraction.

Entertainment is hypnotic and distinctive enough to make you wish it had a few more tricks up its sleeve. The venues get smaller, the phone calls home become more desperate, and the encounters with strangers grow more surreal, but the film never shifts gears; it hits the same note of deadpan despair over and over again, until shock begins to calcify into boredom.

Watching "Entertainment" is a profoundly uncomfortable, some would say repellent, experience that isn't easily forgotten. Yet 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.

The fragility of Neil's airtight act might almost symbolize a death knell for a certain kind of early Aughts aggressively ironic appropriation, though a visit with some rowdy bohemians in a compound muddles the picture. Let's all drink to the death of a hipster?

A mostly silent road trip interrupted by the crass, hackish and hilarious comedy of Neil Hamburger, it presents a mundane but troubled America that fails to move forward. Failures in communication, linguistically or interpersonally are at the heart of this portrait.

[One] standout is Rick Alverson's Entertainment, which somehow manages to be more caustic and despairing than The Comedy, which, though uproariously funny, was so bleak that its title felt like a misnomer nevertheless.

Rick Alverson's pitch-black Entertainment renders its crude, Andy Kaufman-esque protagonist through an Eggleston-ian sensibility, resulting in as haunting and singular a comedy as anything since Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

What's odd, and serious, about Entertainment are the ways that its two levels—which we can call earnest and ironic—act on and against each other in a tricky play for the viewer's sympathies.

Part road movie, part endurance test, the movie tracks the Comedian as he baits his audiences, attacks easy targets (Courtney Love) and, in some apparently genre-mocking moments, tries to connect with his daughter. Mr. Alverson's greatest achievement here is to keep you in your seat instead of bolting for the exit.