Indeed I have. A fine film.

Going broke on the hand is probably inevitable. What's idiotic (as I believe the pros also note in the commentary) is putting your entire bankroll on the table in the first place, if losing it means you have to drive a truck to pay the rent.

I pretty much agree with all this. Re: Mike's tell, I did note in the piece that he could theoretically be leveling KGB (I'm just gonna use the lingo here since god knows nobody who doesn't play a ton is reading this), but I just don't see any evidence of that elsewhere in the hand, or even elsewhere in the film. And…

I investigated that last one. It does look like it could be tens, but what Teddy throws is reportedly the deck, not his own hand, which never leaves the table.

Salieri, were you in the front room or the back room?

I moved to California a few years ago, so I'm not up to date on the underground scene in NYC. When I left the only remaining clubs were tiny one- or two-table joints where the game would often break an hour after you arrived. I pretty much stopped going and switched to Internet poker. And of course that's worked out…

Thanks, guys. I'm not a professional but I've played a whole lot. During the initial boom I was making more money from a $1-2 no-limit hold'em game (with a sweet $500 max buy-in) than I was from film criticism. Not that that's saying all that much. 

Because I only did a long weekend at Sundance this year, I didn't see many of the World Cinema films either. But one of the ones I did catch, Chile's Young & Wild, ranked among my favorites. If nothing else, it's far and away the most inventive and accurate depiction of social media I've seen in a movie to date.…

You are correct. I misattributed. Thanks much.

There's conflicting advice on that score. Some people say it helps, in that the animal doesn't spend weeks or months looking/waiting for its dead friend. Others claim it can be traumatic. My cat seemed to have both reactions: She doesn't appear bewildered by his absence, but for a good month she ran full-speed every…

I was unaware of the Inventory. Seems to be a coincidence. Or actually the true coincidence is that both myself and the AVC staffer who proposed the Inventory both had a pet die recently.

I looked at the Quaaludes scene (I looked at almost every scene, actually), but it was just way too long, clipwise.

Not direct-to-video.
This movie is dire (or at least the 40 minutes I watched before bailing were), but it did come out in NY and LA on 25 March.

Actually, I hadn't seen the clip you're looking at, which must have been taken from a different DVD than the out-of-print one I own. (The AVC tech wizards do the grunt work.)

The film actually never even once leaves her apartment, if memory serves. (It's been nine months or so.) We see her primping in the bathroom before going out, then cut to her returning with a dude. And Rowe doesn't show her out on the beat, just dealing with editors over the phone. It's a film of genuinely shocking…

Funny, I've been very conscious of not repeating directors (so far) but I wasn't even thinking about actors. Maybe I should do Squid and the Whale at some point…

Mim, I'm at a loss as to how you could read this post — in which I spend two full paragraphs noting that despite an absence of A's, this year's lineup is gratifyingly arresting and ambitious — and summarize it as "only 'whiffs' and 'trifles' in this year's Cannes." I even went out of my way to describe the film I…

I swear I didn't write that myself.

Admittedly I'm not exactly the biggest fanboy out there, but I am puzzled that this complaint was provoked by a post in which I actually kinda liked two of the three films. Not sure how that fails to come through. (And I like Boogie Nights, too, for the record, though I don't think it's one of the Greatest Movies Ever…

I really wonder about this. I've seen Pulse on film three times, in three different venues and two different cities, and it is just *not* supposed to be that dark. And yet I looked up some reviews of the DVD when I was writing this piece, to see whether the Magnolia transfer been universally condemned as a botch job,…