THE PLAYER (1992)

It’s remarkable to consider the elements that went into the production of Robert Altman’s The Player, the 1992 adaptation of Michael Tolkin’s incendiary novel from 1988 about the bitter grist mill that is Hollywood. Here was a hot screenplay, written by Tolkin himself, that quite literally took the fiercest of aims at itself with a […]

VINCENT & THEO (1990)

Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo begins amid an industrial clang of a score by Gabriel Yared over a vibrant smear of colored oil paints which suddenly shifts to a Christie’s auction in which Vincent Van Gough’s 1888 still life, “Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers,” is going up for sale, climbing higher and higher in value as […]

TANNER ‘88 (1988)

Even with questionable projects like Quintet and A Perfect Couple finding their ways into theaters in 1979 only to find his fortunes crater in 1980 with the underperforming Popeye and the mostly never-released HealtH, it would still appear that, on paper at least, Robert Altman’s sojourn away from the multiplexes from 1988 to 1992 was […]

BEYOND THERAPY (1987)

Beyond Therapy is bad. And I don’t mean that it’s a weaker Robert Altman effort or that it’s bad of kind. I mean to say that it’s a bad movie that I could scarcely dislike more even if it had been written and directed by Henry Jaglom, a major/minor talent I love and cherish as […]

FOOL FOR LOVE (1985)

I find myself experiencing deja vu as I sit to write this because I feel like I’ve visited this viewpoint before with an old review of John Cassavetes’s Love Streams. No, I’m not talking about the similarities between that film and Robert Altman’s Fool For Love (especially their big reveals halfway through their respective stories). […]

STREAMERS (1983)

After the critical success of his cinematic adaptation of Ed Graczyk‘s Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Robert Altman set his sights Streamers, the last in playwright David Rabe’s trilogy of pieces surrounding the Vietnam war. Self-financed and shot on the quick in Dallas, Streamers almost means to be the […]

COME BACK TO THE FIVE & DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (1982)

With cinematographer Pierre Mingot’s camera crawling across the dusty and crowded aisles of the shabby Woolworth’s five-and-dime aided by nothing but the sound of the hot Texas wind blowing in the background, the stillness is shocking and the silence is deafening. After the assaultive soundtracks and busy tableaux of Robert Altman’s body of work from […]

POPEYE (1980)

As the seventies came to a close and a new day was dawning on Hollywood, filmmakers and studios began to shift their work and business models to better prepare for the type of film they needed to make. Sure, the point of any movie studio at any time in the history of motion pictures had […]

HealtH (1980)

When you begin to consider the high-level talent that went into the formula that produced Robert Altman’s HealtH, it’s difficult to recall another movie in film history that was, and continues to be, treated as poorly. Coming directly after Altman’s twin failures of 1979, Quintet and A Perfect Couple, its production was relatively quick and on-the-fly; an […]

A PERFECT COUPLE (1979)

Coming off the universally reviled and glum Quintet, Robert Altman began to move back toward the warmth of human relationships with A Perfect Couple, a lighthearted romantic-comedy that tracks a mismatched couple through a series of sweet-natured misadventures as they connect, decouple, and reconnect. Put against Paul Newman’s fight for survival in a world not […]