"Rock films, or rock bands for that matter, were never looked at quite the same way after this film was released. Rob Reiner, er, Marty DiBergi gets the director credit, but somehow I feel the combined improvisational talent of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer has an awful lot to do with the sublime content within. Yes, it’s funny, but it’s also as painful as any Bergman epic. Such is life."

"Virtuosic linked stories, all but one set in Rumania, Austria, or Germany before WWII, whose charming, maddening, light-minded narrator has no particular need to notice that murderous thugs are rising up and closing ranks right in front of his nose. The book is an exceptionally vivid evocation of pre-war Central Europe, and it’s also terrifyingly funny in its examination of specious reasoning, casual complicity, and the obtuseness that’s the hallmark of privilege."

"Who can really understand Bowles’ writing? Well, some people can, but not I. Nonetheless I love it, and it has the irrefutable hyper-reality of dreams. Only a very few other writers (Denis Johnson is one) have used American English with such exactitude and so cracklingly, have observed so fearlessly the emotional abysses that confront us, and are so deliriously funny. Claire Messud’s introduction to the recent Ecco edition is eloquent and insightful."

"A beauty supply store owner of a certain age loses her husband, and thinks that’s the end – but her friends rally around her, and various members of her complicated family (her sister, her daughter, the stepson who’s come into her life as an adult) still need her love and competence. A funny, moving story with some smart things to say about aging, mental illness, and how a mother’s work is never done."