As John Q. McCabe, another blustery hustler out of his depth, he projects — with comically furrowed brow and tragically boyish eyes — first a terribly magnetic charm and then a terror at the knowledge that charm alone will never suffice.

| Original Score: A | Feb 7, 2025

Here's a revisionist Western that strips the genre bare: Instead of gallant heroes and beautifully choreographed gunfights, there are only stupid men and sloppy shootouts, nothing worth turning into the stuff of legend.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 10, 2024

The story moves so briskly to its inexorable conclusion that it’s easy to miss how little actually happens in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but we’re here for the mood more than the matter.

| Aug 5, 2023

McCabe and Mrs. Miller sticks to its guns and resists the temptation to turn Warren Beatty into a traditional hero.

| Feb 2, 2023

Robert Altman’s third film since staking out his claim on 1970s cinema with 'M*A*S*H' turns the western myth into a metaphor for the fantasy of the American Dream colliding with the power of big business.

| Jan 7, 2023

While not all those films have aged well, McCabe & Mrs. Miller still has the golden glow of Zsigmond's interior shots—and Mrs. M's opium dreams.

| Oct 17, 2022

As a revisionist western it offers an austere view of life on the American wild frontier, with a refined visual style, but I'm afraid even that can't reverse the effects of a narrative as empty as a Colt without bullets. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 3, 2021

Firmly defining the landscape is Altman's famed anachronistic use of three Leonard Cohen tracks which solidifies McCabe and Mrs. Miller as a poetic vision of a culture struggling to pull itself out of nature's chaos -- a cold-hearted and cruel hell.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 30, 2020

Despite the subject matter, which is inherently coarse, the characters are largely unlikable, even when they're not behaving crudely or speaking boorishly.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 30, 2020

A different kind of western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller makes the framework its own-an experimental genre exercise seen through an opium dream.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 2, 2020

McCabe and Mrs. Miller soars to the outer limits of excellence in film-making.

| Jan 9, 2020

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) was iconoclastic and offbeat director Robert Altman's acclaimed revisionist western (or "anti-western" according to some) about the American frontier. It was the first of his two myth-busting westerns...

| Original Score: A+ | Sep 29, 2019

A fascinating upending of the romanticism surrounding the American west and its ideals of masculinity.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 4, 2019

Robert Altman's wintry 1971 anti-Western gives Warren Beatty one of his best roles as the doomed gambler McCabe: boastful, shy, foolish, altogether lovable.

| Nov 2, 2018

a moving portrait of how the little man, no matter how confident in himself, is usually at the mercy of others with more money and more power and less scruples

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 3, 2016

It's an interesting tale with all the classic elements of the genre, and the affair is given added weight by the solid performances of Beatty and Christie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 9, 2016

It's not so much that it's indifferent film -- it's too arch to be bad. More that it's a disappointment.

| Aug 9, 2016

One of the best of Altman's early movies, using classic themes -- the ill-fated love of gambler and whore, the gunman who dies by the gun, the contest between little man and big business -- to produce a non-heroic Western.

| Aug 9, 2016

Altman, that master of interweaving stories, returned to a makeshift encampment, patched together in the country's quiltwork past. McCabe & Mrs Miller turns the American Dream to so much pipe-smoke and wind-whipped snow, fuming and blown away.

| May 25, 2015

"...less a deromanticized Western than an emasculated one."

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 16, 2014