Insightful, terrifically funny and, next to Superbad, the best of the in-name-attachment-only Apatow features.

One of the more watered-down of Mamet's tales (the dialogue is there, but harder to spot - this one is more a collection of obscure Mamet references dressed up as an adventure tale). Interesting that it debuted the same year as The Game, another film about showing rich, white men who in the fuck they were.

Not especially cohesive - it's downright wacky - but pretty impossible to be wowed by. A strange mix of character sterility and cartoon violence with none of the momentum or excitement of the film its doomed to be compared to: Sin City. I keep thinking about Samuel L. Jackson's The Octopus, but not because I'm haunted by him or unimpressed by him, but because I find him befuddling. Undercommitted to his own nihlism, but also casually cruel, he suffers from being overexplained. He and The Spirit cannot be destroyed and both characters look sorta silly trying to, ahem, destroy each other. Made me want to seek out the graphic novel.

With every passing year, this film seems more and more special - and more and more rare.

Remember in Toy Story when Woody had to convince Buzz that he wasn't a Space Ranger but, instead, a humble toy. A child's plaything. Remember how Buzz learned all the values of being a Space Ranger in the real world without, you know, HAVING TO TELL THE AUDIENCE OVER AND OVER THAT HE WAS LEARNING THEM? That was sweet.

Reflects pure dark: Hollywood's writers deteriorate into psychopathic drones unable to separate the construction of fiction from the mundanity of reality. There's actually a whole cluster of has-been's hanging around Dixon Steele, whose night-and-day personality is first cast in the glow of a misunderstood man under extreme duress. These has-been's - a boastful star, a drunken thespian, thee long suffering agent, the matter-of-fact director - all seem as devoid of humanity as Gloria Grahame's Hot Neighbor is rich in it. When the film hits the mid-mark, her perspective takes over, now viewfinding Steele as an obsessive monster, more capable of murder than ever before. This perspective change is what’s huge, in addition to how oddly comfortable Bogart seems in the driver’s seat of cruel, obsessive and violent. The melodrama is undercut by the film's cynical lining, giving the whole thing a heightened effect is not a blip: The mood follows you after screening it. Is this Nicholas Ray with a fucking axe to grind?

Flat, low budget verve which – while passable in the flurry of constant momentum – butts square up against the tinkles of voice-over, memory-laden flashbacks and asides. I see the template items optioned in The Thin Red Line and - for me, anyhow - that was the draw, but the sequences not blessed with offbeat editing choices have a small screen fizzle. Wilde is given to a sensationalist edge, which has an odd feel in the company of its spare, reoccuring moments of quasi-poetry. Certainly harmless, but hardly incendiary.