"For years and years in American cinema, thick-handed, pock-marked gangsters have planned and schemed in smoky strip joints with out-of-focus dancers shaking their hips behind them. The most these exhausted, hard-working strippers could hope for might be a B camera topless shot where they wink at a James Gandofini or Robert De Niro. But then Lorene Scafaria stepped in, grabbed the camera and rack focused onto these hitherto silent background characters, and with the movie “Hustlers,” changed the way we look at crime and American culture by telling their story. Scafaria has been known for her razor-sharp comedies for years, but with “Hustlers” she fully jumps into the world of Martin Scorsese or David Chase and makes their gangsters seem like they’ve had it easy. And she does it most impressively of all without framing her characters as victims. Destiny, Ramona, Annabelle and all of her characters are powerful and have wants and desires that drive them to break the law. Full stop. These women may have been born without the opportunities of the bankers they dance for, or may have children to feed, but they are at the end of the day fully conscious, fully aware criminals. And this movie is their story. Scafaria dares us to not view them as anti-heroes or heroes or villains but instead as complex contradictory characters. A few filmmakers have tried to tell the story of the 2007-08 financial collapse (myself included), but Lorene Scafaria took a page from the legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin, who rather than cover JFK’s funeral back in 1963, interviewed his gravedigger. It was an affecting and surprising piece that made Breslin’s reputation. And like Breslin, by choosing the characters we’ve traditionally overlooked, Lorene Scafaria gets to a side of our collective story that for years has been relegated to the background and makes it real and affecting without apology or judgement."

"People might question this but Rudderless, which was directed by my husband [William H. Macy]. But I say Rudderless because of two things. One is because of the way the movie was structured, and the way Bill directed it. The audience got to experience in a small way, I think, what parents get to experience when their child does something horrific. That you’re going along with one experience of your child, which is, “He or she is like this, and this is the kind of person they are, and I love them dearly.” And then they do some horrific, incomprehensible action and it pulls the rug out from under you. And Bill did that and the movie Rudderless does that; it pulls a rug out from under you. Your breath gets knocked out of you, you go, “[Gasp].” And suddenly you are reevaluating Billy Crudup’s relationship with his son from a completely different perspective and, again, I just think that’s masterful storytelling. The other reason is Billy Crudup’s performance. And, acting with Billy Crudup, I mean, what, did I do two scenes with him, maybe three? It really changed the target for me. I went, “Oh that’s what good acting is.” Really, and it really informed my work on American Crime. So for me it was a clinic on great acting. So for those two reasons."

"Everything is wondrous about this film: the writing, the casting, the texture of the image, the framing, the rhythm of the editing, the music, the direction as a whole. The title, though, the result of a necessary deal with idiotic distributors who imposed it over the original Dear Martha . . . , is a miss. Inspired by a famous case, the film is the exact opposite of your garden-variety “true crime” potboiler. It is many things at the same time: a sublime love story (Marguerite Duras dixit); a poetic exploration of the suburban landscape (right up there with Robert Frank’s The Americans); a fierce indictment of late-fifties middle-class aspirations (the trick here being that the irredeemable heroes of this epic inspire more empathy in the viewer than their victims); a level-eyed look at the hard business of murder (no romantic choreography here, and a smack on the skull with a hammer will make you recoil in horror); and too many lessons in filmmaking to quote in these few lines. In short, this is one of the great American films of the last forty years. The astonishing (and scandalous) thing is that Leonard Kastle never went on to make another film. See the film, go to the bonus tracks and see Mr. Kastle speak: the intelligence, the humor, the clarity of the craft will leave you gasping. It is so good to hear someone who has the arrogance of his modesty."