Critics reviews

While The Player looks great, especially in this 4K restoration, few shots stand out for pure pictorial beauty. Instead, Altman does what he does best by having a roaming camera restlessly pan, track, and slowly zoom, navigating the locations and capturing and conveying the vibrancy of the setting. There is a continuity of foreground and background, where even extraneous exchanges generate spatial consistency as Altman increases points of aural relevance regardless of the apparent visual focus.

Robbins' charisma is complemented by the sensual confidence of Altman's direction, which merges sinuous dolly shots with surreal horror expressionism, tightening a formalist vice that nevertheless accommodates the sort of loose behavioral sketches for which the director's known. The film's satire seems mild now... but Altman's erotic, ironically humane anti-human craftsmanship has resisted the ravages of time, remaining vital in a new age that lives and breathes cynicism.

Altman uses his usual chaotic, overlapping dialogue and abrupt, attention-shifting zooms in a context full of familiar faces, having convinced dozens of celebrities to pop in as themselves; the result has a fun-house-mirror quality that he makes explicit in a wildly stylized sex scene midway through the film.

This is Altman's ANSIKTET--morally ambiguous, self-reflexive in the extreme, questioning the very social foundations of the endeavor of film production--but somehow it can keep the audience grinning as they leave the theater.

A gem; it's not even my favorite Altman, but it'd probably be my favorite by most other directors.

Altman refines his open, 'democratic' style of the '70s, to show an untidy world from numerous shifting perspectives, yet the film is far from chaotic. With its many movie references and film-within-a-film structure, it's forever owning up to the fact that it's only a movie. Only? Were more films as complex and revealing about people, society and the way we watch and think about films, today's Hollywood product would be far more interesting than it is.

It's not clear to me that the entertainment value of The Player is much different from the entertainment value of Oscar night; both are full of star spotting, sardonic gibes about venality and designer mineral water, glitzy put-downs of glitz, and so on. If Billy Crystal suddenly turned up as one of the walk-ons in The Player, complete with one of his ready quips as emcee, he wouldn't really be out of place.

Michael Tolkin's script abounds in such cynical wisdom, but it never loses an appreciation for the grace with which these snakes consume their victims.

The film should captivate anyone with a taste for bold cinematics, unpredictable storytelling, and pitch-black humor aimed at the worthiest of targets: a self-involved and self-congratulatory, industry that often gives lip service to art while worshipping the bottom line.