[Mikey and Nicky is an] odd, biting, grinning, sideways-scuttling rodent of a picture….

[The plot] sounds like the schema of a "character" crime picture, a so-called film noir, particularly since most of it is shadowy. (Virtually all of it takes place at night.) It is those things, but it is several things more. The first additional thing is, incredibly, that it's comic. Actual laughs are scattered, but the overall view of the two men is through a prism of comic detail. The script is by Elaine May, who also directed. Her previous scripts A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, both adapted from other people's stories, were ungainly and ill-focused. Mikey and Nicky is her own work, and she sees its grimness through her well-known comic temperament. Nicky's neuroses, the squabbles, the horseplay that Mikey has to sustain in order to keep credible to Nicky, even the put-upon-drudge...