3 Women

Throughout, Duvall is brilliant: she coins a brand-new caricature of the confident yet clueless single female, then suggests a real person underneath.

Like a dream, it is most mysterious and allusive when it appears to be most precise and direct, when its images are of the recognizable world unretouched (as happens in the film from time to time) by camera filters or lab technicians.

I have seen it many times, been through it twice in shot-by-shot analysis, and yet it always seems to be happening as I watch it. Recurring dreams are like that.

A spectacular artistic success.

A gauzy, perfectly executed vacation in Doppelgänger-burg.

Robert Altman's would-be American art film (1977) is murky, snide, and sloppy.

Altman's signature telephoto framing, omnipresent murals depicting demon-like creatures, and an atonal score add a creeping menace to uncanny California desert settings.

The result is remarkable -- a semi-lucid, feverish tale of female relationships that disintegrates into a kind of woozy, oppressive madness.

The film is rich in brilliant oddities and juxtapositions, never more so than when Duvall and Spacek are encompassed in the same frame.

Insinuates itself into your skull, and earwig-like proceeds to consume all you thought you knew of ontological security

3 Women is definitely a slow burn of a movie, but it's also amazing how well it taps into and visualizes the subconscious. Nothing is spelled out by Altman, who wants the audience to interpret the film's meaning for themselves.

Absorbing until it crashes in a tiresome manner trying to be too inexplicably symbolic.