With one of the best ensemble casts of any film this year, it’s audacious, enthralling and uproarious.

The movie cleverly spoofs the 24-hour TV news cycle, as well as sexism and racism in the workplace. Not every scene is equally funny, of course, but most of the comic antics generate laughs.

Bittersweet, intelligently written, deftly acted and painfully honest.

Once your eyes adjust to the bedazzled opulence of Liberace’s life in ’70s and ’80s Las Vegas, Behind the Candelabra becomes a darkly moving and provocative look at two lonely men who briefly found something like love before the maelstrom of fame, money and drugs, all churning within the confines of the sexual closet, blew it apart.

It’s everything great drama should be — riveting, raw, heartbreaking, funny and very, very smart.

Captain Phillips could have stopped at simply depicting what happened; it’s the steps it takes to examining why it happened that make it extraordinary.