This is the deep probe into the American malaise, the film that should be required viewing before we consider "celebration" of a bicentennial. Almost incidentally, it is one of the great American movies.

| Feb 27, 2025

It is to American film what William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" is to American literature -- an epic definitive statement of the natural undercurrents shaping this nation.

| Feb 27, 2025

Astronauts see God on the moon. Nixon sees pinkos under his bed. The New York film critics see genius in Robert Altman. Is the world going mad, or is it just me?

| Feb 27, 2025

An enigmatic film that is part melancholy and part faith. Its people stumble and bend, but seldom fall and never break. Altman says: We're not as bad as we think we are, nor are we as mighty as we once dreamed of being.

| Feb 27, 2025

It is a special motion picture, its excellence has a lot to say about other films, and it does deserve your attention. But not your reverence. Whatever else it is, Nashville also happens to be a very funny movie.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 27, 2025

As I sit here at my Globe typewriter, spiralling in my enjoyment of Nashville and acutely conscious of its burgeoning reputation among critics, as well as the ticket-buying public, I wonder if it's enough to say that it is an absolutely wonderful movie.

| Feb 27, 2025

Robert Altman's Nashville ranks among the finest hours on the American screen. It's a work so epic, so exhilarating and engrossing that it can be compared to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

| Feb 27, 2025

The resulting movie brims with the bad and the beautiful, careens dazzling among comedy, drama, melodrama, farce, politics, tragedy and even magic tricks. Without ever dropping the beat of that music, music, music which is the very pulse of Nashville.

| Feb 27, 2025

How to describe Nashville, except to say that it is exhilarating. It is so glowingly alive, so joyous in its appreciation of life and humanity that just watching it is enough to give one an emotional high.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 27, 2025

Much of what Altman has discovered in the making of earlier films comes together in Nashville, a complex, exquisitely orchestrated, kaleidoscopic examination of an American city with its unique culture.

| Feb 27, 2025

This movie is Altman's set of stereotypes, of Nashville and of America. But whether they are right or wrong, there is no question that his vehicle for presenting them is an exciting, fascinating film.

| Feb 27, 2025

Nashville is an eye-opener. A think piece. A mind-boggler. A smashville.

| Feb 27, 2025

Ride along with Altman's style, fall into these peculiar rhythms of narrative experience, and Nashville will reward you as will few other pictures this year.

| Feb 27, 2025

Altman's biggest and truest to date, a film about the country music scene in which the maverick director's innovative techniques point a new direction for motion pictures.

| Feb 27, 2025

Robert Altman's Nashville isn't a film; it's a movie. And what a movie! Music, comedy, drama, human passion, dozens of characters. I could go on and on. It has everything -- and does everything perfectly right.

| Feb 27, 2025

The kind of movie people call thought-provoking because it's thoughtless. It's "art" for people who consider art something they don't understand.

| Feb 27, 2025

Here are a few things it is not: It is not a divine revelation; it will not suddenly reveal to you the path to take for the rest of your days nor will it cure the common cold. Marvelous as it is, it is not one of the greatest films ever made.

| Feb 27, 2025

A busy, zigzagging patchwork of a picture that dazzles the spectator with images and sound. Altman's characteristic pitch is a mass assault on eye and ear, and in Nashville he has found the ideal subject. But he tries to do too much.

| Feb 27, 2025

There are no fewer than 24 principal characters in Nashville. And, true to the Altman tradition, no one is less than memorable.

| Feb 27, 2025

The invention is amazingly varied, which is also to say uneven, though not troublingly so. Nashville is undoubtedly the best and most assured film Altman has yet made.

| Feb 27, 2025