Elvis Mitchell

Some people bring their work home with them. You might suppose that Sid Mashburn is one of those guys - the man was born with a name so brand-ready he basically had to become an entrepreneur. ”

If somebody wants to attack my work, that's one thing - that, I'll respond to. ”

The Ebert thing just didn't work out. We just couldn't, like, come to an agreement. And 'Movieline', they obviously didn't want me, because they fired me. ”

His work isn't all glower. Even though he hasn't smiled in a movie since the underrated 'Proof' in the early 1990s, Mr. Crowe is given to a hurt swallow when he's uncomfortable and to a look of suffering in his eyes. ”

Infernal Affairs' uses a vibrating terseness usually found in the writer and director Michael Mann's work. Thematically, this film deploys the techniques Mr. Mann brought to bear on 'Heat,' right down to using a similar cold-blooded electronic score. ”

The mission of '8 Mile' is essentially to garner sympathy for a white rapper involved in an old-school shootout - a rap contest. This may be the final frontier for pop, more unbelievable than the prospect of launching a member of 'N Sync into orbit. ”

Justin Lin, the writer and director of the teenage-wasteland drama 'Better Luck Tomorrow,' a shrewdly tense piece of storytelling, recognizes that sometimes it's good for a filmmaker to stir up trouble. ”

Black Hawk Down' has such distinctive visual aplomb that its jingoism starts to feel like part of its atmosphere. ”

Music is a big part of the director's life; Ms. Coppola's previous feature, a screen adaptation of 'The Virgin Suicides,' was informed more substantially by the score by the group Air than by the narrative. ”

One of the funniest things about Mr. Kaufman is that all of his filmed scripts - 'Being John Malkovich,' 'Human Nature,' 'Adaptation' and now 'Sunshine' - sound like titles from REM's 'Reckoning.' ”