Love this line from Allen Barra's first-rate essay on Jim Thompson's Legacy:
Thompson’s influence on recent crime fiction is profound, including James Ellroy and even Cormac McCarthy, whose No Country for Old Men, despite its high-falutin’ title from Yeats, is Jim Thompson with an existential oil slick.
I'm not a Michael Winterbottom fan, but I like Casey Affleck (who made a surprisingly effective Patrick Kenzie) and I might make an exception for this film:
Update on 2010-06-21 00:47 by Paul Doiron
This line from Barra is pretty good, too:
No other pulp writer, not even Mickey Spillane, will give you the feeling that when you put his books down you need to wash your hands with antibacterial soap.