This Is Spinal Tap

Rob Reiner’s mockumentary deserves plaudits for the British accents alone.

Reiner, with McKean, Guest and Harry Shearer, have done a great job in creating and portraying characters that are dimwitted, cliched and yet oddly endearing.

For music biz insiders, This Is Spinal Tap is a vastly amusing satire of heavy metal bands.

For all its japes and jokes, the movie is really about exhaustion of the spirit: sitting in a bleak hotel suite at 4 a.m. with the bad taste of last night in the mouth and the feeling that tomorrow will not be a better day.

The material is consistently clever and funny, though ultimately the attitudes are too narrow to nourish a feature-length film.

Reiner's brilliantly inventive script and smart visuals avoid all the obvious pitfalls, making this one of the funniest ever films about the music business.

This brilliantly crafted and completely on-target satire of the rock 'n' roll industry is filmed in mock documentary style.

This now stands as one of the premier cult movies of all time, an honor no one saw coming back in ’84.

The hilariousness here is unending.

Little riffs of comic genius can be heard amidst the heavy-metal cacophony of This is Spinal Tap...