Altman, Robert (1925—)
Considered to be the most prolific, if not the most influential film maker of the New Hollywood Cinema of the early 1970s, writer/producer/director Robert Altman made 13 ...
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As a filmmaker, Robert Altman (born 1925) was known as a risk taker and a nonconformist, who was committed at all cost to his own vision. While this led to what many critics consider a highly uneven o...
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Critical Essay by David Robinson
[The James Dean Story] breaks new ground by its purely documentary approach; the way with show-business life-stories has always previously been to avoid using the leas...
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Critical Essay by Pauline Kael
[Images] is a modern variant of the old The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ploy—the world as seen through a mad person's eyes. A classy schizo (Susannah York) dup...
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Critical Essay by Richard Combs
Conceivably, schizophrenia is a malady to which all Robert Altman's major characters have been prone. Their behaviour is of little interest analysed on the level...
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Critical Essay by Charles A. Baker
[There] is in Brewster McCloud and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as well as in That Cold Day in the Park and M∗A∗S∗H, an underlying view of life and t...
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Critical Essay by Robert B. Meyers
[In his "'McCabe and Mrs. Miller': Robert Altman's Anti-Western" (see excerpt above), Gary Engle's] purpose is to praise [A...
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Critical Essay by Charles Gregory
Philip Marlowe's back and the Seventies got him. Raymond Chandler's private eye, who survived threats from gangsters, gamblers, karate experts, cops, tr...
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Critical Essay by Howard Thompson
Say one thing for "Countdown."… It makes the moon seem just as dull as Mother Earth.
[It] is simply stultifying. The bulk of it is a slack, clich...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Kanon
Altman is a director who works on the periphery: he can take a tired motif and move around it with such precision and freshness that the very form seems altered, expande...
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Critical Essay by Robin Wood
Apart from their intrinsic quality (often very high indeed) Altman's films are interesting by virtue of their centrality to the development of the American cinema, ...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum
[An assorted array of cranks] populate McCabe and The Long Goodbye, each riding on an autonomous wavelength that runs at an oblique angle to everyone else's...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Sarris
In the past I have been up on Altman when everyone else was down, and down on Altman when everyone else was up. I have always found it strange that so somber and so pes...
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Critical Essay by Marc Green
Robert Altman is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme who had a curl right in the middle of her forehead. When he is good, he is very, very good, but when he is bad&#...
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Critical Essay by Jan Dawson
Disconcertingly, after the tuneless rendering of the Star Spangled Banner that introduced Brewster McCloud, or the 'Tokyo Rose' transmissions that lent an in...
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Critical Essay by Jackson Burgess
The "spoof" … is only one form of American movies' film-consciousness. Somewhere this side of burlesque, connected to it, lies a distincti...
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In the following interview, Altman discusses the course of his career and his critical reputation.
In the Fall of 1982, film director Robert Altman visited the University of Michigan as Howard R. Mars...
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In the following essay, Murphy discusses some prevailing images from Altman's films.
In Provence, Vincent Van Gogh centers his easel in a field of glorious sunflowers. Robert Altman's ca...
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In the following review, Hilferty states that, "Less about fab fabric than the tenuous fabric of society, Ready to Wear is an elaborate striptease of the human condition."
First, the fac...
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Altman, Robert (1925—)
Robert Altman
