"In which Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play two broken goons who bond, bicker, and ultimately level each other during one rough night in Philadelphia. May made this just a few years after The Heartbreak Kid—a perfect movie, and one that I hope Criterion can add to its catalog someday!—and while the two films couldn’t be more different in terms of tone, they both zero in on a kind of self-defeating, self-aggrandizing male psychology that’s a little too relatable at times. And Falk and Cassavetes are so remarkable here that you can’t help but wonder which two modern actors would play these roles today."

"A young John Hurt plays a bitter art school drop-out who forms his own fascist political movement, the Party of Dynamic Erection. It’s very proto-Withnail & I, and it’s not lost on me that George Harrison was involved in producing both Little Malcolm and Withnail. So it’s cool to think that my favorite Beatle helped make the best two movies about crazy assholes in trench coats screaming at each other in shitty apartments. Mike Leigh directed the original production of the play of Little Malcolm and I can also see how the Scrawdyke character may have informed him in creating Johnny from Naked, another misogynistic, visionary crackpot trying to assert his manhood."