This film, from director Robert Altman, shows us a few days in the intertwined lives of various Los Angeles residents. Some of the characters already know each other, some will get to know each other and others are merely destined to cross paths. We see snapshots into their various lives. A group of fishermen discover a body but decide not to report it straight away. A waitress hits a young boy in her car; he appears to be fine but is later rushed to hospital. A clown, married to one of the anglers, is invited to dinner at the home of an artist who is married to the doctor treating the boy. An adulterous policeman tries to get rid of the family dog and the ex-husband of the woman she is seeing decides to literally take half of what they own. These are just some of the stories and characters we meet along the way.'Short Cuts' isn't an easy film to describe as there isn't a conventional plot; the characters each have their own little story; some have obvious resolutions, others don't. The opening scenes tell us how the city is being sprayed to deal with a medfly infestation but that has almost no bearing on what we see. This might all sound rather confusing but actually when watching I found it made sense and the way the film skipped from one story to another kept me interested; it certainly didn't feel like I was watching a three hour film. The cast is packed with well-known actors; Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Robert Downey Jnr, Madeleine Stowe, Tim Robbins, Francis McDormand and Chris Penn to name just a few; these and the others are on great form making their characters believable even during the more extreme moments. This certainly isn't for younger viewers or the easily offended; as well as such things as Jennifer Jason Leigh performing phone-sex while feeding her young children and Julianne Moore arguing with Matthew Modine while half naked there is a nihilistic feel at times with the fishermen's story and a murder in the closing scenes. If you believe a good film needs a strong plot then this probably won't be for you but if you want a film that is all about characters and how they interact then this is definitely one to watch.

This drama film is well-written and is well-acted by its ensemble cast. It's about various characters who live in Los Angeles. Family, luck, death and infidelity are among the topics covered.It's over three hours long, but holds your attention. A similar format and style was used for Magnolia - both films have Julianne Moore in the cast.

...I try to tell from inside the universe of one single human being I become speechless because I cannot decide what to say and what to conceal.But not these three men who wrote this screenplay like a symphony between Bach and Jazz - and Mark Ishams music is the same kind - divinely brilliant.A novel? Two? Three, five? Or is this all hackneyed phrases? Is there a difference at all? Three hours full of moments I found myself smiling and slightly shaking my head at the same time. Never saw such a lot of 'perfect pairs' as in "Short Cuts"!The set dressing and costume design are straight to the point. Always winking. Don't worry about little earthquakes. Never get a breakfast in a diner without sunnies. And don't lose heart because of a body in the river... Simply enjoy - inside the prison of life :-)

Another impressive Robert Altman ensemble piece, for the most part. Short Cuts brings us a look into the lives of an extensive number of Los Angeles residents, interconnecting in sometimes loose and sometimes more direct ways. We see doctors, singers, mothers, waitresses and plenty more, all done in the fluid and rhythmic fashion that one would expect from the man who brought us Nashville. Short Cuts feels very much like an L.A. film; there's a controlled chaos to it all that feels frenzied but in a strange way that lets you know that Altman is still behind the wheel.Over the course of the film we delve further into the lives of each individual, focusing on a few and exploring them deeper through Altman's heavy themes of morality and mortality (the film is based on a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver). It's a film that if it hits you right could get you doing a lot of self-reflecting on life and death, which is always a powerful thing to resonate within an audience. The most surprising thing about the film for me was how quickly it went by. Coming in at a running time of over 180 minutes, I was always quite intimidated by it and was expecting at least part of it to drag no matter how good the overall product was, but it flew by.Altman has this indescribable way to pace these epic ensemble pieces that make them feel so fluid and complete, keeping the focus on each character just long enough to unfold another layer but moving on to the next before it starts to drag. It's really one of the more impressive things about his capabilities as a director, how magnificently paced they are. For the majority of Short Cuts I was very impressed with everything that he was able to draw out of his cast; the emotions felt so genuine and, as he did in Nashville, the performances were mostly authentic and deeply lived-in.I don't think that it mixes the comedic and dramatic elements as well as it could have, but there was an understated quality to the dark themes that made it feel a lot more natural than if he had poured on the melodrama thick, which he easily could have given the material. Here he works with more established names than he did in something like Nashville, but there was a real lack of vanity from the actors, none of them allowing their prominence to overshadow anything else about the rest of the ensemble. Altman brings all of these characters together in a way that feels alive but not overly cinematic, expertly staged and paced...for the majority of it.There's a scene where Julianne Moore and Matthew Modine's characters get into an argument over a possible infidelity of hers, and it's around this scene that the film takes a bizarre turn for the worse. The performances that used to feel so genuine were all of a sudden desperately forced, the understated emotions that were allowed to build were now coming to the surface and were so melodramatic and shoved down the throat of the audience. It was as if Altman and the cast took everything that was working so well about it beforehand and decided to do everything in the completely opposite fashion for the final stretch. I struggle to think of a film that took such a dramatic shift, especially so late in it's game.By the time we reach the heavy-handed climax to bring together the universality of the characters, I wanted to scream at how desperate it all had become. It felt as though Altman had stepped down from his chair and let someone much less skilled than he come in and try to finish it, but they just hacked it to pieces. Short Cuts is a very good film for 150 minutes that is almost derailed by it's final 30.