A certain species that thrive in English departments and creative writing programs make good fodder for satire in Dana Schwartz's The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon.
If director Riley Stearns sometimes loses his thematic bearings, he never forgets to deliver large, violent doses of comedy in the instant cult classic, The Art of Self-Defense.
As in the America of the 1970s -- with its political corruption, war, economic straits, and fatalism -- Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud resonates loudly in these times. Shall we join the circus freaks dancing on the grave of an absurd and unjust society?
Adjustment Day may not be peak Palahniuk, but it is nonetheless entertaining and twistedly educational, providing abundantly peculiar and original paths within one of his most astute and necessary social commentaries to date.
While Anthony Asquith's Shooting Stars and Underground look excellent on Kino Lorber's digital restoration, Arthur Robison's The Informer, looks most spectacular, thanks to working from the original negative and a tinted nitrate print.
Documentarian Penny Lane challenges you to leave behind your preconceptions and give the Devil his due in this irreverent, entertaining look at the Satanic Temple, Hail Satan?
Let's pretend for a moment that Bret Easton Ellis is capable of such a staggering feat of truth-telling, and read White as if it is indeed a work of nonfiction.
In rendering his most avant-garde characters as members of a kind of self-help conspiracy in The Made-Up Man, Joseph Scapellato offers not an update but a revision of absurdism, and as such, many social phenomena ripe for satire get off easy.
If Shirley Jackson's simple parable, "The Lottery", couldn't inspire self-reflection in an arguably simpler time, one has to wonder what messages today -- such as that of Bojack Horseman's "The Lottery" episode -- are falling on deaf ears in these times of increasing gun violence in America.
Adam McKay's gonzo Dick Cheney biopic satire, Vice, won't be compared to Shakespeare, but it shares the Bard's disinterest in supervillains' motivations.
Winner of the coveted Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award in 2018, Ulster American is primed to contribute to societal narratives while lampooning contemporary injustices.
Not their first foray into bringing the short story form to cinema, the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs affirms, sadly, that in this regard, cinema is the lesser storytelling form.
In the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, there's something altogether new about having revisionist western ideas filtered through their rich sense of character, black comedy, and their penetrating awareness of humanity's fatal imperfections.
The Trump presidency is Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida made real – only it's stripped of the mythology and just lying bare and ugly for all to see.
Diamantino's astounding surrealistic introduction soon unfolds into an ethereal genre-mashup.
Gary Shteyngart's state of the nation satire about a billionaire on the run doesn't tell us much about anything.
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