The first must-see film of the year.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

"Short Cuts" is made up of a number of Raymond Carver's brilliant short stories. Although Carver wrote them as separate stories, in the film they are linked in clever and unexpected ways.I was surprised to learn that a number of reviewers criticised Altman's tone, and the fragmentation the stories underwent to create the script. However, I think it shows his genius in pulling the stories together to make a continuous narrative.The film opens as helicopters spray Los Angeles to eradicate Medfly. As the helicopters pass over the city, the camera zooms down and selects a number of people from the millions below. The lives of these people are brought into sharp focus, allowing the audience to share their pain, secrets and desires. Self-absorption is a trait shared by many of the characters; they appear to be concerned only with themselves. Even when they learn that terrible things have happened to others, their reactions are often superficial and unaffected.Altman has been criticised for having too cynical an attitude towards the characters, anticipating their failure in a way that Carver did not in his stories. However, a number of the characters in the film grow though adversity and many of them are basically good people.Of them all, it is the highway patrolman played by Tim Robbins, the character who seemed to have the least chance of redemption, who undergoes the most dramatic transformation.Neighbourhood watch takes on a new meaning when neighbours ask a couple played by Lili Taylor and Robert Downey Jnr, to mind their apartment, but they move in, throwing parties and having sex in the bed.Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a phone sex worker who deals with her client's calls while she feeds her baby, however she is never in the mood for sex with her husband played by Chris Penn. His repressed feelings erupt in the film's most disturbing sequence.It almost seems reasonable when three guys on a fishing trip decide not to report a dead body until after they have finished fishing. Later, the morality of their decision becomes an issue.Much of the film centres on two families who live side by side. Bruce Davidson and Andie McDowell play the Finnigans whose eleven-year-old son, Casey, is in hospital after being hit by a car. Before the accident, Mrs Finnigan goes to a bakery to organise a cake for her son's birthday. The baker, played by Lyle Lovett, becomes enmeshed in their lives in an unexpected way.Tess and Zoe played by Annie Ross and Lori Singer live next door to the Finnigans. They each react differently to Casey's accident but it leads to a tragedy just as great. Tess and Zoe are the only characters not drawn from Carver's stories.Jack Lemmon plays Howard Finnigan's father. It's a role filled with regret for past actions and lost opportunities.The structure of "Short Cuts" is not unlike Paul Anderson's later "Magnolia". Both have multiple, intersecting story lines. The similarities become more marked when towards the end of "Short Cuts", an earthquake intercedes as does the rain of frogs in Magnolia. However, the earthquake doesn't change the course of the characters lives or provide redemption. The film ends leaving the characters to deal with their lives as best they can.Altman couldn't always pull off a masterpiece as Prêt-à-Porter proved, but he came pretty close with this compelling movie.

...I try to tell from inside the universe of one single human being I become speechless because I cannot decide what to say and what to conceal.But not these three men who wrote this screenplay like a symphony between Bach and Jazz - and Mark Ishams music is the same kind - divinely brilliant.A novel? Two? Three, five? Or is this all hackneyed phrases? Is there a difference at all? Three hours full of moments I found myself smiling and slightly shaking my head at the same time. Never saw such a lot of 'perfect pairs' as in "Short Cuts"!The set dressing and costume design are straight to the point. Always winking. Don't worry about little earthquakes. Never get a breakfast in a diner without sunnies. And don't lose heart because of a body in the river... Simply enjoy - inside the prison of life :-)

Altman, as many have written, had a career that is pretty much evenly divided between hit and miss. While I have always enjoyed his films, to be totally honest and fair, not all of his work qualifies to the magnificent high standard of being Altmanesque.Altman loved jazz, and the best of his best work move like a brilliant jazz performance. To move along with his groove, to truly become part of the experience requires a certain presence of mind. Like the greatest jazz artists, there are those who enter into deep debates over which work is best: is Kind Of Blue better than Bitches Brew? More important? In the end, it does come down to taste and preference, and this would be my second favorite Altman film after the sheer perfection of Nashville. The films are like watching someone make a quilt, "bit by bit, putting it together" (as Sondheim said), with no one particular thread being more important than another, just a simple, glorious collection of threads pulling together to form one majestic piece.The perception that his films are "scattered" or "confusing" or "dull" because of that missing story line is, sadly, understandable: we are being fed a constant stream of Single Story at every turn, being easier to market and exploit. Altman, at his best, had no need of a single narrative line and on those occasions in which there is no semblance whatsoever of a single story arc AND he is moving at his best, he creates films quite unlike any other by any one.Both this and Nashville are invitations, seductive in their own way: there is no fourth wall in these works, while we watch them, it is as if they are watching us.

Another impressive Robert Altman ensemble piece, for the most part. Short Cuts brings us a look into the lives of an extensive number of Los Angeles residents, interconnecting in sometimes loose and sometimes more direct ways. We see doctors, singers, mothers, waitresses and plenty more, all done in the fluid and rhythmic fashion that one would expect from the man who brought us Nashville. Short Cuts feels very much like an L.A. film; there's a controlled chaos to it all that feels frenzied but in a strange way that lets you know that Altman is still behind the wheel.Over the course of the film we delve further into the lives of each individual, focusing on a few and exploring them deeper through Altman's heavy themes of morality and mortality (the film is based on a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver). It's a film that if it hits you right could get you doing a lot of self-reflecting on life and death, which is always a powerful thing to resonate within an audience. The most surprising thing about the film for me was how quickly it went by. Coming in at a running time of over 180 minutes, I was always quite intimidated by it and was expecting at least part of it to drag no matter how good the overall product was, but it flew by.Altman has this indescribable way to pace these epic ensemble pieces that make them feel so fluid and complete, keeping the focus on each character just long enough to unfold another layer but moving on to the next before it starts to drag. It's really one of the more impressive things about his capabilities as a director, how magnificently paced they are. For the majority of Short Cuts I was very impressed with everything that he was able to draw out of his cast; the emotions felt so genuine and, as he did in Nashville, the performances were mostly authentic and deeply lived-in.I don't think that it mixes the comedic and dramatic elements as well as it could have, but there was an understated quality to the dark themes that made it feel a lot more natural than if he had poured on the melodrama thick, which he easily could have given the material. Here he works with more established names than he did in something like Nashville, but there was a real lack of vanity from the actors, none of them allowing their prominence to overshadow anything else about the rest of the ensemble. Altman brings all of these characters together in a way that feels alive but not overly cinematic, expertly staged and paced...for the majority of it.There's a scene where Julianne Moore and Matthew Modine's characters get into an argument over a possible infidelity of hers, and it's around this scene that the film takes a bizarre turn for the worse. The performances that used to feel so genuine were all of a sudden desperately forced, the understated emotions that were allowed to build were now coming to the surface and were so melodramatic and shoved down the throat of the audience. It was as if Altman and the cast took everything that was working so well about it beforehand and decided to do everything in the completely opposite fashion for the final stretch. I struggle to think of a film that took such a dramatic shift, especially so late in it's game.By the time we reach the heavy-handed climax to bring together the universality of the characters, I wanted to scream at how desperate it all had become. It felt as though Altman had stepped down from his chair and let someone much less skilled than he come in and try to finish it, but they just hacked it to pieces. Short Cuts is a very good film for 150 minutes that is almost derailed by it's final 30.