Metrograph

Opening with a bravura studio lot crane shot that’s the first of its several references to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, The Player is a poison pen letter to Hollywood from Altman—like Welles, a perennial outsider—in which executive Tim Robbins finds himself the target of a disgruntled screenwriter with a score to settle. A stinging satire of the industrial moviemaking system run by studio apparatchiks insensate to art and fixated on profitable formula, Altman’s black comedy was—ironically—his greatest popular success since the ’70s, clearing the path for his return to directing films on a large-canvas scale.

Distributor: Janus Films