20 Films That Went From Bombs to Beloved

Not every cinematic bomb remains forgettable. Sometimes, a failure is just a gemstone in disguise that will only reveal itself well past the release date.

                                      
Film
    
        Absurdism and Power: Robert Altman's 'Brewster McCloud' in Today's America
    
Matt McKinzie

        12 Jul 2019
    
Film
    
        In Two Minds: Robert Altman's 'Images' Essays the Terrors of Schizophrenia
    
Imran Khan

        04 Mar 2019
    
Music
    
        Tom Waits: Preacher on a Pale Horse
    
Christopher John Stephens

        26 Apr 2018

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Not every cinematic bomb remains forgettable. Sometimes, a failure is just a gemstone in disguise that will only reveal itself well past the release date.

Altman spent his entire career amplifying the hidden comedy in America’s soul. Short Cuts is his most sweeping and relatable sketch of the country caught off-guard.

If you ever wonder why certain elements get tossed into a movie, remember: beauty never needs to be justified. These and other thoughts on recent Blu-ray releases.

At times it feels as if Altman is forcing us to drink drain cleaner in order for us to feel the gut wrenching pain of the farce that American democracy has become.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller toys with and subverts western tropes and traditions while flat out refusing to fall into others.

In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the 1971 western directed by Robert Altman, bullshit seems like the stuff empires are built on, but as we quickly come to find out, it can also turn to quicksand.

If you want to get a complete understanding of Altman, his filmmaking style, and why his movies are so important to the history of cinema, Frank Caso’s book is a must read.

Some '70s movies are more '70s than others.

Robert Altman's '70s noir is a terrific, sad, and mischievous movie.

The Long Take can at once be subtle enough to be missed by the audience and astounding enough to entrance that same audience... depending on who is paying attention.

100 Essential Directors celebrates directors of distinct vision, who have honed their respective crafts, who have brought something new and exciting to the medium, and who continue to push the boundaries of the form.

Leaving Godard aside, ReFramed explores the pure entertainment value of Robert Altman's oft-dismissed California Split.

Miranda Richardson discusses this season's premiere feminism-themed film about the real-life strike at the UK Ford plant that challenged and changed British laws on equal pay. Just how far have we come since 1968 in the fight for gender equality in the workplace?

Forty years on, McCabe & Mrs. Miller remains Vancouver’s cinematic benchmark. By the time McCabe rolled into production, M*A*S*H had made Robert Altman a star, and he returned to Vancouver with his core team to create a Western like no other in film history.

Robert Culp and Bill Cosby's wit and warmth in I Spy also established a foundation of fragility and fatalism for Culp's despairing Hickey & Boggs.

This film is a smoldering evisceration of male hypocrisy, pretense, racial anxiety, and sexual panic that would give Neil LaBute pause.

Mills is a movie lover who, like a penniless kid with his nose pressed against the windows of a wonderful restaurant, aches for the unobtainable.

That a down home jamboree could be interesting to heavy-metal loving middle school students speaks to its wide.

A Prairie Home Companion combines typical Altman strategies, like overlapping dialogue and converging multiple storylines, as well as his fanatical appreciation for the process of creating art.

You might call A Prairie Home Companion an unlikely Lindsay Lohan movie. You could also call it the best work she's done, the best work she's likely to do, or the best chance she's had to do good work.

This uneven collection is a definite example of the adage 'when he's good, he's very good, but when he's bad, he's very bad'.

Death, or that state 'beyond natural color', is Short Cuts' common denominator.

Evocations of life's uncertainty -- an Altman specialty -- simultaneously expose the obstacles the ballet company must overcome in order to mount a production.

Not just empty genre deconstruction, The Long Goodbye dares to ask some very basic questions about the hard-boiled detective hero.

It is clear about what it is, a study of affect that is also affected.

Forty years on, McCabe & Mrs. Miller remains Vancouver’s cinematic benchmark. By the time McCabe rolled into production, MA*SH had made Robert Altman a star, and he returned to Vancouver with his core team to create a Western like no other in film history.