It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's difficult to explain exactly what makes Robert Altman's Images so enticing. I've never enjoyed his style or the few movies I've watched by him. But this 1972 obscure movie fascinates me exactly because it looks nothing like a Robert Altman movie. It's more of a cross between Ingmar Bergman (Persona) and Roman Polanski (Repulsion), and shows that Altman could have been a completely different filmmaker if he had wanted.Susannah York plays Cathryn, an author of children's books who starts having hallucinations and erotic fantasies involving past lovers, including a dead one. Finding her troubled, her husband (played by Rene Auberjonois) takes her to Green Cove, an idyllic mansion in a beautiful valley. But rather than easing her mind, this desolate place, full of painful memories for ever, only stimulates her deteriorating imagination.There's not much more to the movie besides this, which is why I'm amazed at how fascinating and gripping it is. If the slow, painful mental collapse of a woman fascinates you, you should watch this disturbing movie. For all its simplicity, it's quite complex and unsettling in a mature way.Marcel Bozzuffi, Hugh Millais and the young Cathryn Harrison (who'd be in an even stranger movie three years later: Black Moon) give very good supporting performances.Complementing the movie is also John William's creepy, eerie, slightly dissonant score, the unsettling sounds created by Stomu Yamashta, and the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. It's a cliché to complain about what Oscars a movie should have been nominated for, but for me, more than John Williams, it's Zsigmond who deserved a nomination for his camera work here. The way he captures shadows, the way he shoots nature, showing it mysterious and menacing and at the same beautiful; the way it moves inside a room or across a landscape, contributes to what makes this movie exceptional.This is a masterpiece that deserves more recognition, and for lovers of weird, unusual cinema, it's obligatory watching.

Robert Altman's generally thought of as a weak visualist, his films messy, shapeless and dialogue driven. This is not quite true. And even if it were, there has always been another side to Altman; films like "3 Women" and "Images" single him out as a strong surrealist, adept and spooky imagery and menacing atmosphere. Indeed, "Images" sometimes seems like it was ghost directed by Roman Polanski or Luis Bunuel.The plot? Cathryn and her husband Hugh spend a few days in a spooky country house. She suffers from delusional disorder, "images of past lovers" spontaneously popping into her head. Like Altman's "3 Women", there are hints of temporal displacement, characters merging and occupying the same spaces or conversing with little girls who may or may not be their own younger selves.Is Cathryn crazy? Are supernatural forces at work? Is her mind being consumed by guilt? Why not all three? Cathryn seems to have had an adulterous affair with a French man called Rene. He died in a plane crash but returns as an "image" to haunt her. Meanwhile, Cathryn's infidelity is personified as Marcel, a large brute of a man who constantly tries to force himself upon her. Meanwhile Marcel's wife, an unseen character who we know had affairs, has divorced him, but not before having a young child, a girl who is herself the splitting image of Cathryn.Continuing with the theme of images, Cathryn's husband is a photographer whilst she is an author. The film's soundtrack often consists of Cathryn narrating one of her books, the audience forced to conjure up images to the words she reads.So what are we to make of this? Cathryn and her husband are image-makers. Cathryn, because of her overactive imagination, imagines that her husband is having an affair. These thoughts, fuelled by her own past infidelities, attack her as "images". In order to restore her sanity, Cathryn thus murders her "image" of Rene and her "image" of Marcel. Finally cured, she drives to her husband before encountering an "image" of herself on the road. The implication is that Cathryn must now destroy her "image", confronting the paranoid source of these monsters. And so Cathryn pushes her own "image" off a cliff. With this symbolic suicide, she is now free. But we then learn that the final "image" was not a self-image at all. It was her husband whom Cathryn encountered and murdered on the road. And so the film ends with a reversal of the classic Hitchcock shower scene. Cathryn faces a deadly "image" of herself; she is the monster, her delusions fragments of her own warped persona.Altman hints at this by naming his 5 characters after the actors who play them. They're not only "images", but "composite images". Marcel Bozzuffi plays "Rene", but "Rene" is the name of actor Rene Auberjonois who plays "Hugh", "Hugh" being the first name of Hugh Millais, the actor who plays "Marcel". Similarly, Susannah York plays "Cathryn", whilst the actress Cathryn Harrison plays a "Susannah".8/10 – Eerily similar to "3 Women", this is essentially an art house thriller. The film seems to have inspired the end of Scorsese's "Taxi Driver", in which Travis Bickle famously sees himself in his car's rear view mirror. Altman's female psycho does this as well, complete with that familiar little audio zing.

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.

An audacious title for a film? But ultimately a playful rather than presumptuous outing. Well, as "playful" as a trickster god can be with one of his subjects, or as a filmmaker can be with the fragile psyche of his subject.The "images" in the film often settle on glass objects, several times focusing the frame on a camera's lens to make the symbol as transparent as can be. We are reminded that how we see things, the medium we look through, is crucial. Thus how the main character, Catherine, here views the world is shown to be unreliable.The suspense of the film mounted strongly for me in the first half, it avoids being a mere whodunnit in favor of whodonewhat, if anyone did anything. Susannah York I thought was excellent as the jittery lead, and having her cast as a children's fantasy writer was a nice touch. Somehow that made her seem more susceptible to madness and a break from reality. Her psychosis seems to have a sexual link, if that pushes your buttons.Reading in bits of her fantasy over the film might bother folks (those who hate any sort of narration), but here the fact that the narration has nothing to do with what is on screen again underscores that sort of madness. We all have been doing one thing while thinking of another, but by and large the doing part is dominant. Here the dubbed in narration makes it feel like the thinking is eclipsing the doing.The male characters all have a seventies stiffness, especially Rene Auberjonois who seemed like he was taken from a cassette on how to talk like and be a successful US businessman. Not sure if that bugged me as much as trying to place him as the younger version of the shape-shifting Constable Odo. Allegedly Altman wanted Sophia Loren once in the female role, but I think York was the better choice, as her sultriness unwraps itself more surprisingly. Sophia's genie would be hard to keep in the bottle.Overall a pleasant surprise to me, the video quality of my rental from Netflix was not as splotchy as others' copies, but the idea of this being a good rainy day watch, I'll second. The first half was an 8, the second a 6...so...7/10 Thurston Hunger