Even when The Long Goodbye is ’70s shaggy, director Robert Altman (at the height of his powers) maintains a core tension within Marlowe’s wild goose chase.

| Apr 17, 2025

It all comes down to the wisecracking Gould – messy and unkept, with a cigarette loosely dangling from the corner of his mouth. He’s the special sauce that makes the whole thing work and a perfect fit for the kind of movie Altman is shooting for.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 16, 2024

Robert Altman and Elliott Gould might not be the ideal director/actor for Phillip Marlowe but they really make The Long Goodbye their own with their satirical contribution to the genre.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 7, 2023

Altman holds genre clichés and conventions up to the light of modern life—and uses them as a prism to reveal its hidden tones.

| Dec 19, 2022

A logical (if less romantic) extension of Chandler’s vision of Marlowe as the last hurrah for chivalry in a fallen, postwar world.

| Aug 4, 2022

Robert Altmans film, scripted and streamlined by Leigh Brackett (who helped adapt IThe Big SleepI for Howard Hawks), reimagines Philip Marlowe as the last of the old school detectives in a world that has moved on.

| Apr 22, 2022

Robert Altman's modernized take on film noir is bleak and beautiful, though not the ha-ha send-up of the genre as it's been described.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 7, 2022

If the film holds together, it is largely because of Elliot Gould's ramshackle performance, which turns Marlowe into a figure who is both absurd and strangely compelling.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2022

The Long Goodbye is not just classic Altman, classic neo-Noir, and classic satire, it's one of the best and most underrated films of the 1970s.

| Original Score: A | Dec 21, 2021

The film is cynical, of course, but also oddly moralistic via its handling of the noble if disheveled protagonist.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2021

Some of the improvisational scenes don't entirely work, but it's an ambitious and artful reinvention.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 26, 2021

This is mordantly funny and deeply upsetting, and if you're looking for a way into the expansive oeuvre of Robert Altman, this is a great place to start.

| Sep 10, 2021

...a classic 1970's film; unique, individual, downbeat and scuzzy...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 21, 2021

The plot is extremely complex, with a couple of scenes relaying details in both the foreground and background simultaneously, neither of which should be missed.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 30, 2020

There may be one or two more farcical elements here than is customary, but for a real send-up you would have needed Woody Allen rather than Gould who is All Wooden.

| Jul 23, 2020

A masterpiece of sorts, it digs beneath the surface of the supposedly liberated spirit of the times to expose the ethos that took America into the Vietnam war and produced Watergate.

| Jul 17, 2020

The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings - the blunt ideas at its core - don't become apparent before several viewings.

| Jul 17, 2020

A subtle criqiue of the main character that contains some astonishing set pieces.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 17, 2020

Ranks as one of the most intelligent adaptations of the celebrated thriller writer's work since The Big Sleep in 1946.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 17, 2020

The Long Goodbye is an unusual, innovative take on the detective drama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 17, 2020