Just perfect...

good back-story, and good acting

Dreadfully Boring

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

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)

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!

Robert Altman's engrossing drama Images stands alone in his vast collection of directorial achievements. Though he directed other intense dramas, this opus of unsettling psychological intrigue is about as far as one can get from his more familiar fare of offbeat comedies populated by equally offbeat characters. In a landmark performance that garnered her a best actress award at Cannes, Susannah York portrays Catherine, a troubled soul who desperately tries to escape her innate demons and memories of past relationships. Increasingly, reality and fantasy start to blur as Catherine develops a coping mechanism she thinks will solve her mental dilemmas. Unfortunately, there's an inherent danger in her method's madness. Images was beautifully filmed in Ireland by master cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and veteran composer John Williams provided the score. Altman protégé Rene Auberjonois effectively portrays Catherine's somewhat clueless but good-natured husband.

Like so often with Robert Altman's movies, his films are either quite bad or terrific (not counting the mid-90s onwards, when everything he touched was crap). "Images" is one of his best movies.There is much to recommend here. First of all, the eeriness Altman creates shames 99% of all horror films - and this isn't even a proper horror film, but more like a drama with a strong "Twilight Zone" touch to it. No time is wasted here; from very early on strange things happen. It's a psychological horror/drama that will keep you guessing -until the decidedly UNhappy ending.I have no idea why this movie is both hard to come by and totally forgotten. Instead, whenever Altman's name is mentioned, we hear how great "The Player" is supposed to be. That movie is mediocre. Forget "The Player" and that moron Tim Robbins; instead, check out "Images", "3 Women", "Vincent & Theo", and of course "M*A*S*H*", to see Altman at his best.