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One of my all time favorites.

Absolutely the worst movie.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Well if this isn't a film for movie buffs, then I don't know what is. Oh, and it's a brilliant story too! I started a list of my own of all the cameo spots and stopped at about twenty or so because they just kept on coming. Seeing Steve Allen at the Mellen (Sydney Pollack) party made me do a double take because I didn't know when this film was made and I knew Allen passed on a long time ago. The story has a couple of twists that are ingenious and tend to have the viewer keep one's guard up. Like the character of David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio), who's made to seem so obvious that he's the spurned writer who's sending Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) the death threat postcards, that you immediately brush him off as the guy Mill has to watch out for. Then there's Lyle Lovett, slinking around in the shadows following Griffin looking like he's about to waste him, and it turns out he's a detective. Very cleverly done, as were all the hints dropped about how this movie might end with the viewing of 'Habeus Corpus'. This is definitely a movie to watch more than once as I thought I had picked up on most of the guest shots, but the credits at the end of the picture revealed a whole bunch more that I never caught the first time around. And if that weren't enough, there's a great piece of trivia the film offers with that murder scene where Tim Robbins' character kills Kahane by ramming his head into the pavement and drowning him in standing water. In the 2003 movie "Mystic River", Sean Penn's character drowns his long time friend believing he killed his daughter. The friend's name was Dave Boyle, played by Tim Robbins!

A major name director does Hollywood satire. That right there is enough to sell a movie. And when "The Player" is actually about the business, it's a blast. The studio power structure, the entitled executives, the animosity toward writers . . . it's a culture deserving of a good jab in the rib cage. And Altman shoves pretty much every recognizable face into this thing; it's absurd ow many people show up here.But it's also self-indulgent, and when we're not making fun of the industry or stargazing, the murder mystery really jams on the brakes. This is a deeply cynical movie, so the outcome's not surprising. And Robbins' dance with the law just starts to drag after a while. Whoopi Goldberg actually stole the second half for me; her appearance gave it a much-needed charge.This is entirely worth it for its technical merits (I just know that that opening tracking shot is used in film schools) and it's well acted and directed. But it lost me when the main character became the sole focus.6/10

I don't like any Altman films, so I didn't expect much from this one, and didn't get anything. Meanders from one meaningless, unrelated scene to another. It's like the long intro scene is the model of the rest of the movie. It got to the point where the dialogue ceased to mean anything. I can hear the words, but nothing is registering. The fact that all these stars would appear in this dog says more about them and Hollywood than all the pseudo-jokes.It devolved into watching a stream of cameos.As one reviewer said, better to turn off the sound and just watch the celebs, one after the other.As I said, I don't like any Altman film. Like Mash, with the long, boring, pointless football game at the end, where they spit on Radar. Sure it became a good TV series, but Altman didn't write the script.Also, "The Player" was too long. After a while, it even gets boring to watch a parade of celebs. And the movie within the movie. I guess they though it was pretty clever then, and people do now, but it's been done many times before, and better. I guess if you're at a Hollywood party, with everyone stoned and drunk, and The Player is playing, everyone hardly watching, and people are saying, snootily, "Oh, look at that", one could acknowledge that this movie exists. Otherwise, no.

Robert Altman is one of the rare American directors who have succeeded in keeping loyal to their own style and vision while also being able to carry on for quite a long time. Altman began directing in television in the 1950's, had his cinematic breakthroughs in the 1970's, and kept working hard until his death in 2006. He always kept a healthy distance to Hollywood, but it seems that he -- like so many others -- had a twofold relationship with the dream factory. The influence of classical Hollywood, which the director adored, is apparent in Altman's cinema, but at the same time he expresses great frustration and even loathe towards Hollywood. Both of these attitudes emerge powerfully in his witty, insightful, and lightweight satire of Hollywood, "The Player" (1992) which is filled with references to film history. The story focuses on a Hollywood studio executive, Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins) who starts to investigate an abandoned screenwriter sending death threats his way. After murdering the writer more or less unintentionally, Mill falls in love with the writer's girlfriend, but his new life is once again threatened by the police investigating the murder case. In the meantime, Mill's studio is producing a new film whose director wants something else than standard Hollywood entertainment, but the studio has different plans. The line between reality and unreality, fiction and non-fiction begins to blur as Mill's life starts bearing a resemblance to all those film-noir movies whose posters hang on the studio's walls. This is the core of the story to which Altman anchors all the multiple story elements that he enjoys developing. Inter-textual references, satirical jokes, and celebrity appearances might at times feel too much, though they all serve a purpose. The abundance of the film is fragmentary, but this episodic nature of the film does not need to be seen as a flaw, since Altman skillfully keeps it all together. To my mind, the beginning of the film nicely introduces Altman's stylistic program and summarizes this ability of his to keep many threads together. The film begins with a long tracking shot, recording the life inside a Hollywood studio from casual dialogue about movies to awkward pitching producers have to listen to, which seems like a direct reference to Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" (1958) and its famous opening. Like this opening shot, the narrative of "The Player" is overall very self-aware; that is, the spectator is invited into taking the representation to account. One is often paying attention to the way things are structured rather than the things themselves. This might be at times alienating -- and intentionally so -- but Altman also strongly focalizes his narrative to the subjective point of view of his protagonist, enhancing the absurdity of the milieu and its surrounding events. All of these narrative elements serve Altman's purposes of criticizing Hollywood. His criticism, though stark and poignant, is hardly hostile, however. Overall, "The Player" is a veritably lightweight film in the sense that it doesn't have the emotional heaviness of "3 Women" (1977) nor the structural complexity of "Nashville" (1975). The film does have its depth, but it is less striking -- for better and worse. All in all, "The Player" is a very enjoyable film, but it might be a slight letdown for people familiar with the director's earlier work. Nonetheless, a viewer who loves Altman's films will most likely cherish this one as well, perhaps in a fashion similar to Altman's relationship with Hollywood.