The Player (1992)

A successful Hollywood producer receives death threats from a screenwriter he rejected the work of.

An almost typical Robert Altman film, with a mixture of many characters and many cameos from famous actors and a very balanced control of many narrative threads with the expected subtleties and superficialities. A small change in this case comes from the focus on the producer played by a wonderful Tim Robbins, who juggles paranoia, sympathy, contemptuousness and grandiosity as if they were not contradictory concepts. In general, Altman's films do not have such a thing, the central point around which many characters orbit rather being a central event, but in this case the central orbital point becomes a character, skillfully and meaningfully labeled via the film title as The Player. Fascinating to any fan of the world of cinema (in the film there are probably around 50 actors playing themselves), The Player draws even more through the wonderful parallel of the producer's situation to the real world, in which undeserving individuals (aptly and directly stated by screenwriter Kahane in his brief appearance) have enormous power over the fate of real talent and those born without privileges. There are also secondary ideas related to the "involution" of young idealists into their skeptical adult self that befalls almost all without fail (this is the case of the young director who loudly declares "no stars!" to then applaud obscenely after the final scene of his adaptation when Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis appear in a happy Hollywood-like ending that's very much the opposite of the initial intention of mirroring the sadness of reality). 

Director:  Robert Altman   

With: Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Vincent D'Onofrio, Peter Gallagher, Dina Merrill, Sydney Pollack, Dean Stockwell, Richard E. Grant, Cynthia Stevenson, Brion James

Rating: 9/10