Rent Short Cuts (1993)

Overated - Short Cuts review by HM

People's lives brush against each other as they pan out as a series of accidents. Intellectually interesting I suppose, but boring from the point of view of entertainment. Maybe even pretentious? Overlong to no great end frankly.

Great - Short Cuts review by JD

One of the Great American Movies.

Interlocking stories, multiple storylines, great cast and Julienne Moore’s ginger pubic hair, what’s not to like ?

Inventive and influential but hard to like - Short Cuts review by JB

Robert Altman spent his career experimenting with depictions of normal life in extraordinary circumstances - meandering dramas with great actors conversing in overlapping dialogue in a sprawling semi-chaos. Short Cuts is a quintessential example of this but at three hours long, with an ensemble cast of 22 lead characters and with some dour, if brilliant, source material from Raymond Carver, it's frequently impressive but not easy to warm to.

The stories include a phone sex worker whose husband is suspicious and jealous of her job, a waitress who knocks down a child in her car, an artist with marital difficulties, a melancholic children's party clown… you get the picture. That cast adds a bit of levity, though - Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin, Lili Taylor, Tom Waits, Jack Lemmon, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Robbins to name just a few.

Clearly an influence on Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia amongst others, it's heady stuff but the dour tone, lack of much fleshed-out plot and its unchecked misogyny (there's any excuse for the women to disrobe and it is arguably a parade of weak male characters who come across as martyrs) make it hard to like. But come for the cast and the technical wizardry.