Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★★ 1

  the house always wins, of course, the trouble is that you don't own it anymore by the time it does.

  one of the best, most lucidly despairing movies ever made. not to downplay its inquiry into the cold heart of capitalism, but this would make for a great opiate triple feature alongside House of Pleasures and The Flowers of Shanghai, in case you want to drown in orange and not move for 8 hours (and who wouldn't?).

  i watched it by the flickering light of a fire on christmas eve and achieved such nirvana that i saw the face of santa, himself. i suggest you try it, sometime. incidentally, leonard cohen makes for great christmas morning music.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 7

  "I told you when I came I was a stranger."

  I would've watched this much sooner if I had known it's essentially an American The Great Silence. On the one hand, you've got the ground-level intimacy and dirty period detail of a bearded, gold-toothed gambling fool (who thinks he's a gunslinging cowboy) only coming to the brutal realization that the American dream of free market innovation and entrepreneurship is just a fantasy sold by the biggest company in town when his own corpse is added to the foundations. On the other you've got Altman's bleeding heart romanticism for the little people making do despite always being on the verge of being crushed; walking around town in this snowy, dreamy, flashed…

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 10

  There's no business like ho business in the town of Presbyterian Church, Washington!

  Perfect movie. Funny, beautiful, heartbreaking. Warren Beatty is brilliant as the kind of guy America mints by the millions: a charming, half-smart doofus, coasting on an invented rep who succeeds just enough to be crushed by the real killers who run this free enterprise system of ours. In America, if you ever get a chance to sell out, take it!

  This was my dad's favorite movie.

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 1

  [camera zooms in on me from very far away] boy did this make me really want a double whiskey with a raw egg

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★½ 3

  86/100

  Third viewing, but a more general assessment will have to wait for round four, because I'm writing this less than a week after Leonard Cohen died and Trump was elected. Which means that all I can think about right now are (a) "The Stranger Song" accompanying wintry shots of horseback riders, and (b) McCabe listening, petrified, as his attorney confidently outlines the legal mechanisms that ostensibly protect him, and explains why absolute trust in those mechanisms is well justified.

  "Now you take that there company, Harrison & Shaughnessy. They have stockholders. Do you think they want their stockholders, and the public, thinking that their management isn't imbued with all the principles of fair play and justice? The very values that…

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★★

  The movie ends and immediately Googling "Can I try on the big coat"

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 31

  "If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much, follow me?"

  McCabe & Mrs. Miller is pure existentialism in western form. It watches as its two titular protagonists gradually establish themselves only to just as gradually disappear under a pile of blood-spattered snow and in a cloud of opium smoke. Life in brownscale. Everything fades away.

  This thematic framework applies broadly to a few different topics. The most obvious one, given that this is a western (albeit quite a revisionist one), is the dichotomy of civilization vs. frontier. The primary narrative of the western mythos is the progressive civilization of North America which must counterintuitively be brought on from the outside, law brought by the lawless outlaw figure…

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★ 1

  This is as good as movies get. If you don’t like this, consider another art medium.

  Big laughs on this viewing when McCabe meets with that lawyer-cum-aspiring politico who tells him a bunch of idealistic stuff about the importance of busting monopolies, and then in the next scene he tries to parrot it all back to Mrs Miller as if he thought of it. No movie has made better use of the Chevy Chase-ish side of Beatty’s talent, not even Ishtar.

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★ 2

  I hope that everyone who worked with Vilmos Zsigmond on Jersey Girl and The Mindy Project appreciated that they were in the presence of a genius.

  Gobsmackingly beautiful ugly movie about being dealt the awful hand of living in the Pacific Northwest circa 1902 and having only the local brothel or opium den to relieve the nonstop misery. OR you can become an entrepreneur and be killed by a monopolist.

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  Review by Branson Reese 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Beautiful movie, and I'm not just saying that because my girl Shelley Duvall is in it. Zsigmond shoots British Columbia the way it must've felt to these people, like the soaking wet edge of the earth. Something I couldn't stop thinking about while we watched was the film lens of nostalgia, how completely it's colored my own sense of how history must've looked. When I imagine Ancient Rome I imagine a Technicolor epic full of senators who look like when we had more interesting looking actors. When I imagine the Wild West I imagine whatever Sergio Leone wants me to imagine. This is 1902 in Washington but it's also 1971 in British Columbia. They're completely different times with different sensibilities…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 5

  80/100

  McCabe & Mrs. Miller, right from the chilly opening, is a detached and aching odyssey into ambition and transactions. Never have negotiations and subsequent character shifts looked so gorgeously alive and lived-in. It's a film that is drenched and buried within varied amounts of rain, mud, and snow, and the only shelter lies in the orange hues of saloons and crammed hotels. Before viewing, I read that it was a dismantling of the Western genre, but as always, Altman subverts expectations in profoundly delightful fashion.

  It's as if Altman wanted to craft a sorrowful poem for all these settlers and gamblers and prostitutes and gunfighters, and even if it's too late, sometimes it's worth trying anyway. Not an ode to the West, but an ode to the travelers who are trying to find what was promised. Certainly a film that I will appreciate more and more with every rewatch.

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  Review by Evan T ★★★★★ 13

  Magical. A shimmering winter dream, predestined to turn into an all-out biblical nightmare. McCabe & Mrs. Miller leaves many things on the mind, but for me one fundamental question takes the lead — why isn’t this widely regarded as the greatest western of all time? Sure it’s an anti-western if you take it at face value, the notable lack of cantankerous desert, boyish playfulness and larger than life shoot-outs reminding us that this isn’t just any old exercise in genre bravado. It’s got the crash-zooms, the cowboys, the saloons and the stables, but there’s one thing it’s packing that most westerns don’t have: an authentically ordinary protagonist. Without giving the game away, I will say that Altman’s hold on McCabe is perhaps…