Too much of everything

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

And my pick is the latter. "Images" seems like an experiment in opaque "art" cinema that Robert Altman just wanted to get out of his system relatively early in his career; so he throws in just about every bizarre shot and incident he can think of, without much regard for internal coherency or logic. The puzzle IN the film gets completed, but the puzzle OF the film never does. The film is similar to the following year's "Don't Look Now"; in both cases you have to sit through a lot of rambling pretentiousness to get to an admittedly memorable shock ending. Susannah York's performance is excellent, but that book she reads aloud from (and apparently wrote herself) should be enough to send any kid or adult to the nearest madhouse! ** out of 4.

Robert Altman wrote and directed--and misfired--with this psychological thriller about a wealthy female schizophrenic. Susannah York, an interesting actress (though not so interesting as to make this artistic jumble take hold), plays the future author of a children's book about unicorns who is upset one night by repeat calls informing her that her husband is having an affair; she begins imaging other lovers in her husband's place, splintering herself off from reality. Gorgeous cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, working the wintry landscapes of Dublin, Ireland with a painter's finesse, adorns the picture with prestige; however, enlightenment into our heroine does not follow. This is a rich person's prism, a slick fantasy of ghosts and musical chairs, the kind of which only seem to affect the well-heeled and bored. With two homes to vacillate between (and no pressing engagements), York's character begins to seem stultified rather than schizophrenic, and the scenario is underpopulated and lax. John Williams received an Oscar nomination for his percussive score, but nerves can hardly be jangled when the script is stuck in such a plushy muddle. ** from ****

Like so often with Robert Altman's movies, his films are either quite bad or terrific (not counting the mid-90s onwards, when everything he touched was crap). "Images" is one of his best movies.There is much to recommend here. First of all, the eeriness Altman creates shames 99% of all horror films - and this isn't even a proper horror film, but more like a drama with a strong "Twilight Zone" touch to it. No time is wasted here; from very early on strange things happen. It's a psychological horror/drama that will keep you guessing -until the decidedly UNhappy ending.I have no idea why this movie is both hard to come by and totally forgotten. Instead, whenever Altman's name is mentioned, we hear how great "The Player" is supposed to be. That movie is mediocre. Forget "The Player" and that moron Tim Robbins; instead, check out "Images", "3 Women", "Vincent & Theo", and of course "M*A*S*H*", to see Altman at his best.

Robert Altman applies the same widescreen canvas he had previously used to capture the chaotic communities of a Korean War MASH unit and a primitive Pacific Northwest mining town to the quieter but no less chaotic internal workings of a troubled woman's psyche in this unsettling and uneven psychological thriller.Susannah York plays Cathryn, wife of a distracted husband (Rene Auberjonois), whose affairs with two men (one a family friend) and her inability to have children become obsessive memories that haunt her and drive her over the brink of insanity during a stay at a quiet country home (the country is never identified, though the movie was filmed in Ireland). She begins the film as a wounded and hunted animal, jumping at every sound and image she hears or sees. One of her past lovers appears as a ghost, the other arrives at the country home with his daughter and gropes Cathryn when her husband's back is turned. The two lovers are vaguely threatening and abusive; her husband is dismissive and treats her like a child. Cathryn realizes that she can take control and kill off her unpleasant memories -- but at the same time she loses the ability to distinguish between reality and her own feverish imaginings.On a first viewing, "Images" is absorbing and oddly fascinating, but it doesn't hold up well. For one, Cathryn isn't a compelling character, and that dooms the project from the start, since there's barely a scene in the film that doesn't revolve around her. She begins the film unhinged and really has nowhere to go from there except more unhinged. We don't learn much about her, and her illness isn't placed in any context. Susannah York delivers a shrill performance, all screeches and irrational outbursts; the male characters all come across as asses. Altman seems to be trying his hand at a feminist text, but he goes about it in the clichéd way that male artists too often address "female" issues. I think he's making some point about the way movies objectify women, turning them into "images" for the consumption of male viewers. After all, Cathryn is little more than something for the men in the film to enjoy, and cameras figure prominently in the film's mise-en-scene (Cathryn's husband is an amateur photographer). At one point, she fires one of her husband's guns (that universal symbol of male sexual power) at the ghost of her dead lover, and finds that she has instead destroyed her husband's camera. Nice try Altman, but awfully heavy handed if you ask me.I'm a champion of Robert Altman's films, and he's never failed to fascinate me with any of his experiments, but such is the nature of experimenting that some are going to succeed more than others. "Images" came on the heels of a marvelous trio of films ("MASH," "Brewster McCloud" and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller") with which Altman announced his arrival as an important figure in American cinema, and he would follow it with four more ("The Long Goodbye," "Thieves Like Us," "California Split" and "Nashville") that would reinforce that claim, but "Images" itself is a weak link in the chain.The stars of "Images" are the mesmerizing production design and the sterling cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond.Grade: B