Omnibus movies -- those composed of several individual segments by several individual directors -- can pose a special critical problem, presenting works of wildly different merits under one unifying title. But it perhaps is silly to worry about this, or even to mention it, when the overriding idea is as …
Further lengthening an already lengthy rut, Robert Altman again takes his source material, if not exactly his "inspiration," from a theater piece, in this case Christopher Durang's comedy about a match made through the Personals of New York Magazine. And then he brings to it that same offhanded style, that …
Or Robert Altman's absolutely unique and heroic enterprise of inimitable lustre. You can't get through the title and credits without wilting under the oppressive self-consciousness and self-congratulation of this debunking of an American hero (or this kicking of a dead horse). Altman's remedy for the anti-Indian attack of past Hollywood …
In the professional gamblers' circuit, from the Santa Anita track to the Reno casinos, Robert Altman has again selected a fortuitous stretch of terrain to survey. However, he seems unable to find much that interests or makes sense to him there, and he sweeps aside most of the gambling scene …
Sam (Michael Angarano) is a charming, boyish goof up. He crashes the wedding weekend of his great ex-love (Uma Thurman). She towers over him, as does her suave, posh fiancé (Lee Pace), a vain preener who seems unthreatened. Director Max Winkler (son of Henry) pulls off small comic nuances, but …
The pronunciation of the last two (or four) words of the title, in the local dialect, is "Jim Dine," like the American pop artist; the actual reference, of course, is to the deceased American actor and cult figure, who has left his mark on a tiny Texas town not far …
Backstage dance musical centered around a Chicago ballet troupe, not necessarily the Joffrey Ballet that does the actual dancing. A labor of love for Neve Campbell, who trained in her native Canada as a ballerina and who co-wrote and co-produced in addition to starring, and just a labor for Robert …
Robert Altman tarries a while longer in the Deep South, idly tracing the stereotypical loopiness of the natives. If the movie lacks the pervasive weather of The Gingerbread Man, it is thickly atmospheric all the same, settling into the locale as into an overstuffed easy chair: Holly Springs, Mississippi, at …
This story of a blackface Halloween kegger-party at a fictional, racially divided university generates enough fertile insight to keep the heaps of dialogue compostable to the point where it helps to cover some of the script’s more familiar dirt. Justin Simien’s caustic attack on Ivy League racism frequently finds characters …
More specifically, a Dallas gynecologist (Richard Gere, with a tidier haircut and a sincerer persona) and his psychotic wife, his materialistic sister-in-law, his protective and adoring receptionist, his numerous demanding patients, a country-club golf pro who becomes his new lover, and his two grown daughters, one of whom is soon …
Another in Robert Altman's series of struggles against innate staginess, orchestrated with his usual sloshing fluidity and trickly leaks around the edges, and permeated with his special vision of humanity as a matter of the askew bow tie and the visible lingerie strap. The theatrical source-material this time, set in …
Adequate biographical data (narrated by Ron Howard), generous film clips (of uneven print quality), and perhaps overgenerous eulogies (from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, John Milius, and Robert Altman), in celebration of the centennial of Capra's birth. Written and directed by Kenneth Bowser.
A strange-bedfellows suspense thriller: the unstructured director Robert Altman at work on an original screen story by the formulaic novelist John Grisham. The former, even though tempering his self-indulgent mannerisms, generates little in the way of tension or excitement, but a great deal in the way of atmospheric weather: Savannah …
From Robert Altman, a pleasant if overlong divertissement that combines the British class-conscious social satire with the dark-and-stormy-night murder mystery: Evelyn Waugh meets Agatha Christie. In short, Altman hell: etiquette, decorum, hierarchy on the one side, and convention, formula, artifice on the other. However much the director might distance himself …