Absolutely the worst movie.

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.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

I'm sorry but this movie was pitiful. I hated it. KC is S-L-O-W, B-O-R-I-N-G, crap. The dialog was laughable, trite and completely unbelievable. This is a bland thirty-minute short story stretched out to almost two painfully excruciating hours. The only good qualities in this waste of celluloid were 1. Great costumes and 2. Fabulous period cars. Where did they get all of those great old cars? CAUTION - This film is for jazz lovers only....and I hate jazz. How bad can it be? If YOU like this crap-fest, then help yourself to my DVD copy. I threw my disk in the trash. It'll be out at the county dump by now (where it belongs). 1 star out of 10

God knows English politics is corrupt,but America seems to have raised duplicity to another level.Wheeling,dealing,threatening,bribing,snouts deep in the trough....I would have to be held at gunpoint before I'd vote for anybody.In the poor black Wards of Kansas City in the mid 1930s it doesn't matter who you vote for,your life is not going to get any better,the successful politico is just going to get richer. With a plot and characters remarkably similar to early Runyon,Mr Altman parallels the development of KC jazz with its turbulent social history. For lovers of Bennie Moten/Count Basie type music the movie is at least an aural treat;for the average moviegoer,"Kansas City" is very much a curate's egg. Unless you are at least familiar with Hawk,Pres,Bird and Jean Harlow your enjoyment of the movie may well be limited to the amount of admiration you have for Mr Altman's more personal work. With all due respect to the acting talent involved,no one apart from the much - maligned Miss J.J. Leigh has much to work with.As "Blondie" she has the only role that actually develops during the course of the film. In an era when movies were enormously influential her conscious morphing into a Jean Harlow persona is touching rather than laughable. With "Kansas City",Mr Altman continued to plough his lonely furrow.That it was not a great commercial success is hardly surprising,but admirers of maverick works will get pleasure from it.Jazz loving moviegoers,themselves to some degree mavericks,scouring the schedules in a usually vain attempt to satisfy both their Joneses,should seize the moment.

This unusual film played like a dark, comedic version of Altman's own childhood; he himself describes it (and most of his other films) as a musical. Similar in structure to Miller's Crossing, I found it to be a tribute, perhaps unintentional, to many of the Coen brothers themes; like painting a serious subject with hues of dark comedy that many mistake for badly done straight drama. Jennfer Jason Leigh's performance is very mindful of her performance in the Hudsucker Proxy, and just as worthy; one is decidedly satirical (Hudsucker, and this one is an essential statement of character, as a sadly-going-nowhere Midwestern babe who loves Jean Harlowe and the Hollywood escapism of movies, and spews as best she can in her own tragic "real life". Certainly not Altman's best, but why should it be? It is defining of his articulation on film about music, a face in the crowd tragedy overlooked, and his own fast paced violence that ends life and is over in seconds, unlike his contemporary Sam Peckinpaugh and a thousand other directors. Without the music I would have rated this film a seven or lower, but without the music, West Side Story would be a 5 and South Pacific a 2. This film is haunting in many, many ways, and its muted use of color gives it an appropriately old fashioned 30's look and tone. The most memorable assembly of jazz artists and rifts on film. You can see better films; you'll never hear better jazz.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a desperate woman who tries to rescue her boyfriend (Dermot Mulrooney) from the hands of local black mobsters led by Harry Belafonte, who have made him a prisoner after he robbed one of them. She kidnaps the laudnum addicted wife (Miranda Richardson) of a Roosevelt political adviser (Michael Murphy) in an effort to somehow get enough leverage to achieve her goal. The Kansas City of the Depression setting looks pretty real and wide open, not only for crime but also political fraud. Robert Altman made a great character for Steve Buscemi as a brutal political operative who's assigned to get out the vote by any and all means possible, including the use of baseball bats, but he failed to give him enough space. Nonetheless, he's just another part of this mosaic of the period, and does well enough with the meager scenes he has. Jennifer Jason Leigh is at the film's center while social, political, and economic forces swirl around her. She affects a Jean Harlow persona throughout the film, and in one scene is actually in a theater watching a Jean Harlow film. The tough girl act conceals her real life existence as yet another victim of the Great Depression of the 1930's. By the end of the film she appears on screen with her hair dyed platinum blond and in an all white evening gown, actually becoming the famous actress who died so young. While the film meanders around, going into and out of crooked politics, race, teen pregnancy, drugs, etc...and in and out of the Hey-Hey Club with the ongoing birth of blues and bebop, the ending that punctuates the kernel of a plot is quite an exclamation point and is well worth the wait.