GamerTab That was an excellent one.

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Claire Dunne One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Richard Hobby It is understandable that Images will be seen as a horror film about a woman who is not fully in touch with reality. However I believe there is a deeper meaning to this film. Robert Altman, who wrote and directed Images, shows what can happen when someone betrays another person sexually but cannot face that reality.Cathryn (Susannah York) is married to Hugh (Rene Auberjonois), a man very interested in hunting quail but not at all interested in making love with his wife. Cathryn finds love and sexual pleasure with other men.But over time this causes in her an unbearable torment.But she does not tell Hugh. Instead she divides her soul into two separate worlds: the wife of Hugh in an asexual marriage and the lover of other men with whom she loves to be treated as a slut and with whom she has intense sex. But Cathryn is unable to keep the two worlds from spilling into each other. The results are violent and tragic.Putting a psychiatric label on Cathryn and calling this a horror film actually obscures the deep meaning of the film.Instead Altman gives us poetry. And he does it brilliantly.

lasttimeisaw Shot in Ireland with only two major locations and a micro cast of six, Robert Altman's IMAGES is a visually innovative, narratively intriguing and thematically cohesive probe into a woman's slow descending into schizophrenia, with a phenomenal leading performance from Susannah York (crowned BEST ACTRESS in Cannes), which also revealingly exhibits Altman's protean sleight of hand.York plays a minted woman Cathryn, a children's author who is currently writing a new book named IN SEARCH OF UNICORNS, which is in fact written by York and Altman applies its text extensively in the diegesis, notably in paralleled with reality, to emphasize on Cathryn's aberrant mind composed with her own imagination. After disturbed by a ostensible series of prank calls and the startling illusions of her dead French lover Rene (Bozzuffi), Cathryn and her husband Hugh (Auberjonois) retreat to her country house where she grew up, a bucolic haven with mountains, cascades and a herd of sheep. There they also reunite with their common friend Marcel (Millais), who is also Cathryn's old-flame, and his teenage daughter Susannah (Harrison), yes, the first names of the five main characters are coined according to the real names of their co-stars. But illusions are tailing her, she sees a double of herself and soon will be embroiled into the complicated sex entanglement with all three men, obviously Rene is dead, Hugh is real, and Marcel seems to be real too, but what about his aggressive intention to get intimate with her, is that also real?Determined to get rid of the bedeviling hallucinations, Cathryn executes "corrective killings" to regain the grasp of her senses and secure her marriage, after two apparently successful clearance, it seems that she is back on the right track to normality, but a fatal third action will prove everything has gone awry, a chilling ending reveals that schizophrenia has completely seized her psyche.Shot by the late maestro Vilmos Zsigmond, IMAGES exhibits his nimbleness of lurking his camera within a confined space, and the surreal segments are fantastically otherworldly, namely, the sex scenes rotates among Cathryn with her three different mates are aesthetically uncanny, and strategises crystal chimes as an indelible cue to provoke Cathryn's delusional condition. John William's eerie score portentously captures Cathryn's emotional upheaval and the mysterious atmosphere, and earned him an Oscar nomination (after all, the movie is not entirely snubbed by the Academy).Susannah York, occupies almost every single scene of the movie, stoutly calls forth the most daring performance of her lifetime, perpetually tormented by apparitions and descending into her own segregated universe with no one to turn to, she feistily fights a losing battle all by herself, it is a helluva display of bravura to behold, where the final revelation in her shower scene is so powerful that it is evocative of her terrific Oscar-nominated turn in Sydney Pollack's THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? (1969).Overall, IMAGES can be read as a think piece against the overlooked symptoms of mental illness, and a trend-setting thriller as a sound testament that Robert Altman is a virtuoso all-rounder, and left us so many cinematic legacies to hold in esteem!

tieman64 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.

mario_c 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.