Rent Short Cuts (1993)

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 ?

LA Dominoes, Altman in Full Flow - Short Cuts review by griggs

This grabbed me by the collar and didn’t let go — it might just be my new favourite Altman film, and easily the most engaging of his that I’ve watched in ages. The first image is a helicopter dumping chemicals over LA, like the city’s being disinfected before the party starts, and from there it just keeps getting weirder.

Short Cuts is a big, messy web of lives, but it’s easy to stay with. The fun is in the cross-current: a throwaway line becomes a bruise late, a minor character gets a moment that suddenly matters, and the whole city starts to feel wired together by bad timing and worse impulses. Altman’s overlapping chatter is the secret weapon. Conversations collide, misunderstandings breed in real time, and you’re always half a beat ahead… or behind.

And that cast… come on. Julianne Moore, Tim Robbins, Andie MacDowell, Jack Lemmon — it’s stacked, and nobody wastes their moment. By the end, it feels less like you’ve watched a story and more like you’ve spent time in a whole ecosystem. Then the ending lands with that famous jolt and you realise he’s been stacking dominoes all along.

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.