From my favorite movies..

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Dear Robert Altman, Images was a relentlessly eerie and occasionally scary film about the mental disintegration of a woman. I liked the atmosphere that you conjured up with the help of the beautiful Irish countryside and John Williams' unusual but ultimately melodic background score. I decided to watch the film because of Susannah York whom I found adorable in The Silent Partner. Images is not the sort of film I would normally watch. I was not enamored by it. It is a psychological horror film that can be compared to Bergman's Persona or Polanski's Repulsion. I would not recommend it to fans of regular horror films. It is quite dumbfounding on occasions - like when Susannah York's character stares at a car arriving at the countryside mansion from atop a hill. And the woman who steps out of the car is well ..... herself. The film continues with the newly arrived York entering the house and going about things. The men (two of whom could be York's hallucinations) in the film are all lecherous and I was thinking that maybe the film might have a feminist message. That York's character might have become damaged by the men in her life. York is sexy as a woman who is in denial about her own sickness and conveys the feeling of disarray perfectly. I am not sure what it all means. But it was engaging because of York's performance, the locale and Williams' score. Best Regards, Pimpin. (6/10)

It's a great psychological thriller by Robert Altman. The plot is about a schizophrenic woman that struggles against herself to kill "images" in her mind of things and people she doesn't want to remember. She's a writer and she does books for kids but in the story she imagined, about an enchanted forest and the search for Unicorn, she has the main role... It's a story that only exists in her mind but has terrible consequences in real life...This movie is quite surrealistic and the dementia of the main character takes us into a weird, confusing and upsetting story. It's not easy to follow due to its complexity but I think the movie has a linear plot. The happenings succeed in a linear chronology in spite of the schizophrenic and surrealist ambiance this story has.The cinematography is quite good, with a nice camera work (shots/plans) and the shot of beautiful images (the landscapes for instance). The musical score is also good with some creepy and frightening string sounds.I score it 8/10 for the weird and surrealistic story and also the beautiful cinematography.

Something like Images could only really come around in the 70s, which also explains how amazing it turned out. This is not any kind of 'commercial' picture, or whatever could possibly ever be for Altman (to put it another way, it is not Popeye). Images plunges the viewer as far as possible as a cinematic expression can into the mind-set of a schizophrenic. Or is she schizophrenic? We're never given quite the exact diagnosis, but at the same time I kept thinking "Ron Howard, take note this is *really* how it's done". Altman's protagonist is never exactly 'clear-headed', and so in the same sense neither is the audience, which is fascinating and challenging as a work of disorientating storytelling.This isn't to say that, occasionally, Altman gives in to some pretensions the likes of which I could only really see happening from a now "period piece" of the early 70s inspired by the likes of Women's Lib and Bergman's Persona and Repulsion (not to mention children's books). But for the most part Altman films this character piece as fluidly and with a level of concentration not any much more or less than his classics like Long Goodbye or Nashville or the Player. At the same time he uses such spot-on timing with the camera movements and zooms and pans and seamless edits in service of Susannah York's inner being, as opposed to just taking down a kaleidescope-vision or ensemble.Indeed that's one of the more interesting things about Images, is its lack of an ensemble; there's only about four or five actors in the whole movie, mostly with York and her husband out in a secluded house in the countryside visited only by a friend (who's also her lover) and his daughter... and as well 'visited' by an old ex Frenchman who was also probably her lover, at some time before he died. This is part of the intoxication of Images, how we're so bewildered by what may be there or what is, or how York's character's reactions to those around her only send off minor alarms and buzzes (by the end one wonders if her husband ever did find her crazy or not). This includes a series of murders which sometimes aren't real (i.e. gunshot, camera), and sometimes possibly are.And yet I don't want to make it too easy to give Altman all the credit; on the contrary without York and composer John Williams (as well as the sound-man on the film, I forget his name) it wouldn't be nearly as successful an experiment. York is so compelling as a being very fragile and hysterical and yet somehow sympathetic that it's a kind of little treasure of a performance that, sadly, was lost for many years before the film came back on DVD. And Williams, known always for stuff like Star Wars and Superman, marks a really compelling edge here with a lot of strange bits of string selections, stuff that could be conventionally suspenseful if it went a little longer or a little thicker in some sections, but as it stands is a fine counterpoint to Altman's direction. Altogether the daring script and direction (daring inasmuch as trying to film a subjective point of view with rarely a deviation or movement to comfortability), the acting and the music, combine to make a sublime, if slightly imperfect, work of 70s film art. 9.5/10

I'm not really familiar with Robert Altman - I liked Gosford Park, but that's it. However, the plot summary intrigued me enough to check this long lost film.Yes, like all the other reviews say, there are obvious parallels with "Persona" and "Repulsion". It's the kind of movie that messes with your mind, and I love movies like this. I would like to add that the eerie, bizarre atmosphere of this movie reminded me of David Lynch.We see the movie through the eyes of a schizophrenic woman, and just thinking that someone in real life can go through this gives me shivers. It's also what I like to call a "hallucinogenic" movie, in which the dreamy scenery, the incredible camera work and the twisted dialogue play as if you were on a psychedelic substance.Susannah York gives a strong performance, and the beautiful Cathryn Harrison also make this movie worth viewing.If you like surreal movies, with a haunting atmosphere or psychological subjects, do yourself a favor and dig this good arty flick up. Others should not bother.6/10