"Everyone asks me if Nebraska influenced my work. The truth is, no. "Atlantic City" influenced my work, but as a whole, Nebraska isn’t a record that ever connected with me. I don’t know why, and I’m not saying it’s a bad record. I just don’t jive with it. I got sucked into The Ghost of Tom Joad on a road trip I took when I first graduated from high school. It was my first time leaving on my own and taking off for a few days. On that trip I listened to this record, front to back, about 100 times. The song “Highway 29” is still probably my favorite Bruce song ever. I don’t know what it is about this record that makes me love it so much, but to me, it’s some of Springsteen’s finest work and surely overlooked."

"Granted, it’s a little shameless for the guy who wrote a book on 1999 movies to include a pair of entries from that year on his list. But whenever I made a top ten for that year, these are the two films that constantly duked it out for the number one and number two slots. One’s a tightly structured, egalitarian high-school-set comedy that’s as wise about the nightmares of adolescence as it is about the doldrums of middle age; the other’s a happily absurd fable of reinvention that’s part sci-fi, part broad comedy, part media satire. But both are remarkably kind to their flawed heroes, and each one wrestles with the kinds of social and cultural dilemmas—from identity theft to burn-it-all-down political posturing—we’d be dealing with two decades later."

"Criterion’s comprehensive edition of this long-undervalued film is a major DVD event, though it may not enlarge the film’s fan base. The problems, beyond a few incomprehensible plot points, include a dreadful lead performance by Nixon look-alike Robert Arden, who is surrounded by terrific actors in the margins (Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, Mischa Auer, Katina Paxinou), plus gorgeous Paola Mori; the result feels a bit like Hamlet without Hamlet. Then there is Welles’s wig and beard, evidently borrowed from a junior high school performance of Faust. Never mind: there are many, many unforgettable moments, and the plot is so good—detective as inadvertent Judas goat—that a fine, conventional film could still be made from the same material. Criterion includes the surprisingly good novel, which Welles variously took and denied credit for. In my hearing, he took credit."