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

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

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

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

The result, with some offbeat and thereby excellent casting, with the lagniappe of multi-leveled satire on the genre and its period, is a first-rate suspense melodrama.

| Jun 29, 2020

Raymond Chandler's sentimental foolishness is the taking-off place for Robert Altman's heady, whirling sideshow of a movie, set in the early-seventies L.A. of the stoned sensibility.

| Apr 18, 2016

The Long Goodbye as a whole peels back the surfaces of private-eye stories, paying special attention to their macho bluster and abused women.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 15, 2014

The Long Goodbye is a gloriously inspired tribute to Hollywood that never loses sight of what Los Angeles has become.

| Jan 9, 2012

An uneven mixture of insider satire on the gumshow film genre, gratuitous brutality, and sledgehammer whimsy.

| Feb 11, 2009

Simultaneously an act of revisionism as well as a parody of then-revitalizing neo-noir.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 18, 2007

Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work.

| Jun 24, 2006

The reluctant and satirical mystery is one of the great Los Angeles movies and makes a great compliment to, say, The Big Lebowski.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 13, 2005

Droll, cunning and magnificently woozy.

| Original Score: A | Jun 30, 2005

The Long Goodbye attacks film noir with three of his most cherished tools: Whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

[Altman] attempts the impossible and pulls it off.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 20, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 16, 2003

Altman's generalized misanthropy fits uncomfortably with the overall noir universe.

| Mar 10, 2003

Elliott Gould in the lead seems to relish the joke of serving up Marlowe in a radically different way.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 17, 2001