I love this movie. It's a truly magnificent piece of art, and it changed the way I thought about movies. Perhaps it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but if you enjoy challenging, thought-provoking cinema, you must give yourself a chance to savor this masterpiece.

This film is brilliant. Many haven't realized that, what Altman did was to translate Carver's writing style into audiovisual language. Dirty Realism into film. The characters meant to be shallow, because the meaning is dictated by the context.

Sure, the intertwining of stories is masterful and the cast incredible. But the characters are such terrible people. And worse than that, from a movie point of view, they're boring people too. Why would I want to spend any time at all with any of them? They're shallow, pretentious, deceitful, manipulative, ridiculously unperceptive, and ... boring. Watching characters like that fumble through their empty lives and their pointless, nasty marriages isn't illuminating or interesting; it's just ... a boring waste of time.… Expand

This is a European film in America. Strong and copied many times (Crash, Magnolia).

Horrible!!! Wasted 3 hours of my life :(((

One of my favorite movies ever. If you step back and look at "Short Cuts", it's hard not to realize this one bundles up all the great things about all the great films and puts them together. Not just one of the greatest films of all-time, but one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever, right up there with "War and Peace" and "Citizen Kane".

Altman's later movies capture people doing real-life personal things - almost like we're eavesdropping on them. The Player, Magnolia, Gosford Park, the list goes on. He does this very well. But such scenes and his juggling of large temperamental casts does not in itself make a good show. I've got to think critic loyalty is present in the metascore of this 3-hour monstrosity more than quality. There's too much clashing. Why is there dialogue when it is drowned out by music or background noise? We try to hear. We assume a story is being told and try to follow. Altman challenges us to see how much we can stand before we are allowed to glean a nugget of pleasure or truth from a movie that, in the final analysis, substitutes intricacy for plot. Another splendid story gone awry under this director's clumsy pretentious handling. Once again we sense important worthy concepts, but ceaseless obstructive devices block comprehension, and the experience for most of us, who are not stupid by the way, will be exasperatingly tedious. … Expand

Ambitious and bighearted but also sprawling and diluted, it's a rather pale shadow of Altman's masterpiece Nashville. As a whole, lively and engaging but weighed on their own, the mini-stories don't hold much water, which can't be said for several powerful narratives in Nashville.