Many loosely connected characters cross paths in this film, based on the stories of Raymond Carver. Waitress Doreen Piggot accidentally runs into a boy with her car. Soon after walking away, the child lapses into a coma. While at the hospital, the boy's grandfather tells his son, Howard, about his past affairs. Meanwhile, a baker starts harassing the family when they fail to pick up the boy's birthday cake.
"From two American masters comes a movie like no other"
Top Billed Cast
Andie MacDowell
Ann Finnigan
Bruce Davison
Howard Finnigan
Jack Lemmon
Paul Finnigan
Tim Robbins
Gene Shepard
Julianne Moore
Marian Wyman
Tom Waits
Earl Piggot
Lily Tomlin
Doreen Piggot
Fred Ward
Stuart Kane
Detailed Critic & Audience Reviews
T tmdb39513728Verified TMDB Critic
2015-02-04
**tripping over ourselves**
While there's no cinematic equivalent to the Mona Lisa, I submit a list of the top ten American movies of the last 50 years in no particular order:
The _Godfather_, _Apocalypse Now_, _Raging Bull_, _Pulp Fiction_, _Blade Runner_, _Raiders of the Lost Ark_, _Mulholland Drive_, _Tree of Life_, _Boyhood_, _Short Cuts_.
Whaaaaaa... _Short Cuts_? Is it even Altman's best work? Well, everything unique and original in the other movies on this list was done before... by Altman. (Is there anything the man hasn't tried?) And everything Altman achieved in his career c...
F Filipe Manuel NetoVerified TMDB Critic
2022-08-31
**A huge cast full of familiar names, where each one does their job very well… but without commitment, without emotion and under a script so intricate that it leaves anyone lost.**
I'm usually very critical of movies with bad or weak scripts. It's a recurring problem in cinema. This film, however, makes the opposite mistake: the script is excessive, it has so many characters and so many interconnected sub-plots that it is almost necessary to make diagrams and schemes on a board to be able to follow what is happening. I got almost halfway through the movie and I didn't really know who was ...
B badelfVerified TMDB Critic
2026-06-15
Robert Altman's Short Cuts is a lovely polyptych of interconnected stories, inspired by Raymond Carver's short stories and his poem "Lemonade," which asks: what if this had happened, rather than that? What then? It's the question we all ask ourselves at some point in life, the endless branching paths of possibility, the sliding doors moment that changes everything or nothing.
Altman weaves together lives in Los Angeles, letting stories brush against each other, intersect, diverge. A child is hit by a car; a baker calls with increasingly angry messages about an uncollected birthday cake; a w...
