Instant Favorite.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A Martin Scorsese movie with a female lead? Sign me up.This has got to be the funniest film in Scorsese's filmography. I wasn't really expecting it to be. It's not like it's trying to be funny. All the humor grows organically from the characters. And that's the best kind.There are some great scenes in this movie. Loved the opening. I think it really set up the movie. I was hooked throughout. Part of it is due to Ellen Burstyn's is incredible performance. The supporting performances are also good. Harvey Keitel almost steals the scenes in which he is in.This is a sweet movie filled with a heart. But that doesn't mean it's some glossed up version. All the problems Alice faces are real. There are no neat resolutions. There is a little roughness ...a little grittiness.It's an odd film in Marty's filmography. More of this please!

After M*A*S*H started off in the big screen, Martin Scorsese, starts to make a hit movie which would pick up as a TV show years later. In "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", Alice Wyatt(Ellen Burstyn) is a housewife with dreams of being a big time singer gets deterred by many obstacles surrounding her. She was living in a town where she feels like she's getting nowhere in life. Her husband(Billy Green Bush) is everything but supportive in her wishes. She does gets a chance to get out of the town she was living in when her husband dies in a traffic accident. Her son Tommy(Alfred Lutter) is a handful. He is precocious, he talks non-stop, and he wants to try something he likes. After leaving New Mexico, Alice and Tommy head to Phoenix, Arizona to try out singing in bars. When that fell through, she heads to Tucson, and work at a diner owned by Mel Sharples(Vic Tayback). She meets Flo(Diane Ladd), the no-nonsense waitress who can hold her own in everything. Then there's the regular David(Kris Kristofferson) who is divorced, take interest in Alice. Her reluctance hinders her because of her past relationships with her husband and Ben(Harvey Keitel). David owns a ranch, and become a good influence on Tommy. Of course, Tommy is notorious for being bratty. You must overcome the obstacles in life, when you have positive people around, you can lose. Scorsese did a amazing job with this movie. And Ellen Burstyn does a spectacular job playing the role. This is a must see. 5 stars!

The movie's first scene shows Alice as a little girl in a parody scene of a musical, where she sings a song out of tune and yet thinks she can make it as a professional. Years later, she is a married housewife with a scary (if not abusive) husband and a badly-behaving 11-year-old boy, and has had a brief singing career. But Alice is devastated when her husband is killed in a truck accident, and she sells her furniture and home and moves to another city with her son, with plans to live in a motel with her son while working with the idea of saving enough money to eventually move back to Monterrey, California, where she had been happy.But things do not go as intended. She meets a man at the place where she has gotten a job as a singer-only to find him a married man, and a violent thug to boot, so she abruptly flees to another city. She cannot find a singing job, so she has to take a waitress job at a diner, which she hates. She is also constantly fighting with her son, who is flippant and disrespectful. She meets another man who definitely has no other wife-but is he a prize? And has Alice been fair to the people around her, who have problems of their own, or has she been too self-centered all along? As the movie reaches the end, she finds herself questioning everything. The man has hit her son, but was that brutality-or did the son, with all his rudeness, genuinely deserve it? Could this man really be a match for her after all? With a child to take care of, is her dream of being a professional singer really important? Then why did she have a husband and son to begin with? These and other questions are asked by the movie's conclusion.

Finally, I get to see a movie that not only won a best actress award for Ellen Burstyn, but one that drew much critical praise and that people still talk about today.It's a simple story: a wannabe singer loses her husband in a road accident and uproots herself and young son to return to Monterey, California, in order to recapture her dreams of singing again. But it has little in common with films such as A Star is Born (1937, 1954 etc), The Jazz Singer (1927, 1950 etc) and others.That's not much of a come-on for this story, but it's a success because of Burstyn's acting (and Alfred Lutter's, as her son), a believable script with great one-liners and the fine directorial touch from Martin Scorsese. The supporting cast, that includes Dianne Ladd, Kris Kristofferson, Harvey Keitel, a very young Jodie Foster and others, is also quite in tune – no pun intended – with the episodic and even lyrical nature of Alice's journey to self-fulfillment. Seeing as how most have a sense of wanting to achieve one's dreams – no matter how offbeat or off-the-wall – it should appeal to most viewers.I reckon close to a third of the actual film concerns the mother/son relationship: she trying to please and appease, he trying not to sneer and sneeze at her attempts to get a job – any job – and get back to singing; and providing much of the story's comedy in the process. The rest of the movie takes us along the freeways to her personal triumph, where, in Phoenix, she encounters and escapes from the low-life sleaze of Harvey Keitel; breezes into Tucson and the brashly outspoken Dianne Ladd in the next job as a waitress; and finally meets and competes with Kris Kristofferson's local rancher and his need for another wife.So: no, it's not the usual type of Scorsese production: there are no guns, no drugs, no gangsters, no shoot-ups, and very little violence. Just a well-told and well-filmed story that lightens the heart and makes you laugh – and along the way, reinforces where home really is.Recommended for all, except toddlers.May 21, 2012.