Robert Alt­man has died at 81, leav­ing behind a lega­cy of ambi­tious films. After mak­ing his mark with MASH in 1970, Alt­man’s career moved along in fits and starts. He would give us The Long Good­bye in 1973, Nashville in 1975, unfor­tu­nate­ly Pop­eye in 1980 (and noth­ing else too remark­able dur­ing the 1980s), then two career-reviv­ing films, The Play­er and Short Cuts, in 1992 & 1993, and Gos­ford Park in 2001. Despite being a five-time Acad­e­my Award nom­i­nee for best direc­tor, Alt­man nev­er received an Oscar until this past year, when he received a life­time achieve­ment award, rec­og­niz­ing his dis­tinc­tive film-mak­ing style. Glimpses into dis­crete slices of Amer­i­can life (Hol­ly­wood, the coun­try music scene, the fash­ion world, etc.), large casts, long impro­vised scenes, com­plex mosaics of char­ac­ters — these were all trade­marks of Alt­man’s film­mak­ing, and what his lega­cy will call to mind.

Alt­man’s com­plete fil­mog­ra­phy

A.O. Scot­t’s Look Back

Vari­ety Obit

New York­er Review of Nashville (1975)

Here, Alt­man talks about the dif­fi­cul­ties of mak­ing MASH

Janus Films has spent the last 50 years bring­ing clas­sic for­eign films to Amer­i­can audi­ences, expos­ing them to the works of Ing­mar Bergman, Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, Jean-Luc Godard, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, and François Truf­faut, among oth­ers. To cel­e­brate its half-cen­tu­ry anniver­sary, the film dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny has done some­thing pret­ty remark­able. It has released on DVD a col­lec­tion of 50 clas­sic films, which include Black Orpheus (Camus), M (Fritz Lang), The 400 Blows (Truf­faut), Grand Illu­sion (Renoir), Sev­en Samu­rai (Kuro­sawa), The Sev­enth Seal (Bergman), La Stra­da (Felli­ni), and The 39 Steps (Hitch­cock). You’ll love the Essen­tial Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films if you’re a diehard film buff, but not if you’re light in the wal­let. Even when bought at a dis­count of $650, the col­lec­tion still runs a hefty hunk of change. But it’s noth­ing that a home equi­ty loan can’t fix.