Short Cuts

Short Cuts (1993) is Robert Altman's sprawling drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Over three-plus hours it tracks a dozen Los Angeles lives that keep brushing against each other by chance.

Altman wove the picture from the short stories of Raymond Carver. A waitress hits a boy with her car, and the child soon slips into a coma, while a baker hounds his parents over an unclaimed cake. Elsewhere a husband walks in on his wife working a phone-sex line beside the crib, three fishermen find a body in the river and keep casting, and a clown comes home at the wrong moment. Above it all, helicopters spray the city for medflies. The faces include Andie MacDowell, Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore, Tim Robbins, Tom Waits, Lily Tomlin and Chris Penn, among many more.

For that ensemble the film took a special Golden Lion at Venice, awarded to the whole cast at once. Altman films infidelity, boredom and small cruelty without judging, just watching. Near the end the ground shakes, and the threads snap together. Stream Short Cuts (1993) online on iFILM.