The director, Antoine Fuqua, relies on small details, which anchor the vigilante-as-saint myth in at least a minimal degree of reality.

The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has.

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.

The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.

Entertaining the reader is a good function.

Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick J. Buchanan hates.