"Beside Knausgård, Harstad is perhaps the best Norwegian writer right now. It’s about a young boy moving with his family from Norway to the USA, growing up there in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and so it’s an outsider’s look at American society, written with clinical precision and desperate humor. If you like thick, epic books like DeLillos' “Underworld,” this is probably up your alley."

"Jules Dassin’s tour of the London underworld glistens with inky blacks, swirls of smoke, pockets of isolated light, a mise-en-scène broken into Mondrianesque squares, and stunning performances by Francis L. Sullivan, Googie Withers, a Greek wrestler named Zbyszko, and, in the defining performance of a career that ought to get one of those sorry-we-overlooked-you lifetime-achievement Oscars, Richard Widmark, who indulges a brief moment of elation by hurtling a stair railing to affect an incongruous pose of Chaplinesque delight."