A light snooze through the subjects of race, crime, politics, and jazz in said city -- hometown of director Robert Altman -- in the mid-Thirties. To summarize it in such terms is to make it sound more ambitious than it honestly is. The period re-creation -- the array of automobiles, …
Robert Altman's provoking revision of a late, intricate Raymond Chandler detective novel is devoted less to creating a mystery than a muddle. The impenetrable darkness, the stealthy zooms and circuitous tracks of Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography, and the ceaseless buzzing or humming of the actors, conspire together to cover up the …
The sense of humor in this smart-ass service comedy is actually more sick-making than all the bloody operating room splish-splashing. The gags are constructed to have a practical-joke thrust: there is always a victim and a violator. The jokers are a couple of barbarians, conceitedly acted by Elliott Gould and …
Plenty of surface interest for those who enjoy looking at drizzle, cigarette smoke, opium haze. Under the dense atmospheric conditions, Robert Altman's snowed-in Western about the encroachment of capitalist enterprise on a tacky frontier town is exceedingly difficult to make out. Julie Christie and Warren Beatty are in the fog …
In spite of the forced, bully-boy shipboard comedy and mismatched attempts to stitch sumptuous location shots with obvious studio replicas, countless childhood viewings of a center-scan print of Mister Roberts on The Best of CBS render this title beyond criticism. It was far from Hollywood’s first service comedy, but Mister …
Robert Altman continues to course over salient features of the American Scene with amazing speed and mobility. His leaps-and-bounds progress is made to look effortless, smooth, liquidy because of his habit of skimming, primarily. Here, he and his allies visit Music City, U.S.A., but they arrive there with their ideas …
Robert Altman's addition to the Hollywood-on-Hollywood library certainly lifted his sagging reputation, though the reasons for its critical success may have had less to do with its intrinsic merits than with its usefulness as a discussion starter, a conversational ice-breaker. More like dam-breaker. It gave the critic an opening to …
Its title and its emcee have been taken from Garrison (a/k/a Garrulous) Keillor's weekly public-radio show. But there is no mention of the imaginary world of Lake Woebegone, MN. The sole setting is the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, named after native son F. Scott, and ticketed for the wrecking …
Robert Altman looks into the future through a frosted window. What he sees is a snowbound civilization, bands of well-fed dogs devouring human carcasses, and the last survivors dressing in Renaissance costumes and entertaining themselves with an unfathomable game called Quintet, which may be played either with a game board …
Shooting in his habitual indolent zooms (and reverse zooms) and telephoto pans, through a half-blinding dust storm, Robert Altman here recycles the "critically acclaimed" formula of Nashville and The Player -- and, without the acclaim, The Wedding and Health -- in the different setting of Parisian haute couture: a herd …
Robert Altman shuffles together several Raymond Carver short stories, or at any rate several sets of characters from them, and in so doing transforms pithiness into garrulity -- three hours' worth. At the same time he has upped the levels of kookiness and smuttiness, and lost touch with Carver's common …
From Robert Altman, a bona fide American art movie, replete with symbols, Polanski-ish grotesqueries, mirror images, fantasy-reality obfuscations, and the like. It is supposedly based on a dream of Altman's, dealing with two Texas women in the California desert; but his inspiration evidently comes also from Bergman (Persona) and Antonioni …
Both of the van Gogh brothers, the celebrated painter as well as the not-so-celebrated art dealer who couldn't "move" his sibling's paintings. This attention to Theo, while democratic in an almost parental way, subtracts more than it adds: it gives us less of Vincent, and, equally important, less of his …