Kansas City

Fine Line Features | Release Date: August 16, 1996

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

57	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 23 Critic Reviews

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Critic Reviews

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100

Michael Wilmington

Kansas City is a wonderful film, done with all Altman's offbeat virtuosity, maverick humor and creative daring -- plus the acid nip that runs through all his recent works. Read full review

Mike Clark

Though the music is helping market the movie, it's really an omnipresent backdrop to the two intersecting stories. Audibly and visibly, Kansas City nearly equals Ed Wood for period verisimilitude. Yet it's also character-driven, in particular by the women stars. [16 Aug 1996, p.4D]

EmpireKim Newman

Many will find Kansas City unbearable, because Leigh (with a mouth full of jagged teeth and a permanent snarl) and Richardson (who totters along in a druggy stupour), give brilliant performances as extremely unpleasant characters. Furthermore, the ending is a real slap-in-the-face downer. But if you can get past that, this is the real stuff. Read full review

Roger Ebert

What he asks of the actors (those who are “soloists,” anyway) is not realism but the same kind of playful show-off performances he's getting from the musicians. And to understand the acting, it's helpful to begin with the music. Read full review

Jay Carr

Although there's nominally a lot of action, the film doesn't exactly abound in narrative pulse. But its portraits and textures take up a lot of the slack. [16 Aug 1996, p.D5]

Jack Kroll

Kansas City can be regarded as a jazz tone poem on themes of race, politics, money and the movies themselves. Read full review

Kevin Thomas

Too much of some good things and not quite enough of others, Kansas City is the kind of film you're eager to like more than you do. It could never for an instant be mistaken for anything but a Robert Altman film, and that counts for a lot. Read full review

Lisa Schwarzbaum

So much is satisfying in KC that its shortcomings are all the more discordant. Read full review

James Berardinelli

Though Kansas City has its share of arresting moments, the production as a whole is too superficial to be considered amongst the director's best work. Read full review

Mark Miller

Time and again, the story simply stops for another tune from the band. Then again, without the buoyant sounds of Moten Swing, Tickle Toe, Yeah Man and the rest, Kansas City would be an even less appealing film than it already is. [16 Aug 1996, p.D5]

Stephen Holden

If the movie, which uses blues-based Kansas City jazz as a raucous, nonverbal Greek chorus, lacks the emotional range of Mr. Altman's masterpiece, ''Nashville,'' it still has its own brawling vitality. Read full review

Todd McCarthy

For Altman, this is a major statement about American hypocrisy and society’s haves and have-nots, in line with many of his films, but issued in a kind of offhand way that delivers only glancing emotional impact. Read full review

Marjorie Baumgarten

Although the movie contains occasional moments of glimpsed accomplishment, Kansas City is for the most part a lame duck. Read full review

Edward Guthmann

It starts out with several seemingly separate stories and characters, allows them to tease, overlap and shade one another, and then weaves them into one rich fabric. It's an allegory about American life -- a tough, cynical meditation on race, crime and the futility of human endeavor. Read full review

David Baron

This period gangster yarn...is neither in the front rank nor the slag heap of Altman's oeuvre. Rather, it's an atypically accessible attempt at mainstream entertainment that contains both satisfying and off-putting elements. [16 Aug 1996, p.L24]

Rene Rodriguez

It's an obviously personal work, and that's both its primary strength and weakness: The movie has a distinct, carefully detailed sense of place and time, but it's also not as involving as Altman seems to think it is. It's thick on atmosphere, but short on plot. [16 Aug 1996, p.6G]

Stephen Hunter

So much love has gone into the physical details and the music of Robert Altman's Kansas City that it's a shame the movie isn't up to the effort. It's a movie you yearn to care for, but it refuses to allow you: It's too busy being singular to be good. Read full review

Rita Kempley

Kansas City is basically a head-scratcher. Read full review

Sarah Kerr

That Altman shot the jazz scenes well after the rest of the story was in place ought to give them a detached quality of ironic defeat. Yet somehow the musicians come across as the least detached characters in the movie. Read full review

Duane Byrge

It's not a trip of ''Nashville'' sweep. In fact, it's closer to Dullsville. [13 May 1996]

Jay Boyar

A production that's strong on atmosphere but weak in the plot department. Watching this often-tedious film, you begin to feel as if you've been kidnapped - which is appropriate, anyway, since the story concerns an abduction. Read full review

Dan DeLuca

Robert Altman's Kansas City is a hollow period piece, a costume melodrama that's all jazzed up without a story to tell. [16 Aug 1996, p.4]

Jami Bernard

Jazz is a good metaphor for Robert Altman's movies they're often improvisational, free-form and full of unexpected dissonance. Unfortunately, his movies also fall prey to the hazards of jazz they can be boring, screechy and endless. Thus, Kansas City. [16 Aug 1996, p.49]