Mikey and Nicky

Mikey (Peter Falk) and Nicky (John Cassavetes) are petty gangsters in a lonely night’s landscape, on the run from death. Cassavetes’s influence—and both actors’ finest performance outside of Cassavetes’s own films—infuses Mikey and Nicky with an absurd humanity. May’s use of a three-camera setup throughout resulted in cost overruns and a battle with the studio, but it also allowed for spontaneity on set. “A dark dazzler. . . . Over the course of one evening, the two pass an entire lifetime together talking, walking and waiting for the inevitable. Like all May’s films, has the hard-to-capture feeling of spontaneous life” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times).