Critic Reviews

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye attacks film noir with three of his most cherished tools: Whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity.

It's great fun and it's funny, but it's a serious, unique work.

A subtle criqiue of the main character that contains some astonishing set pieces.

Impure Chandler it may be, but it's pure Altman and one of his nose-thumbing '70s maverick classics. [25 May 2007, p.C5]

A gloriously inspired tribute to Hollywood that never loses sight of what Los Angeles has become.

Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of the writer's work.

Superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond in a desaturated colour that echoes a bygone age, The Long Goodbye is an elegant, chilly, deliberately heartless movie.

The film is simultaneously an act of revisionism as well as a parody of then-revitalizing neo-noir.

The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings—the blunt ideas at its core—don't become apparent before several viewings.

Robert Altman's oddball send up of the late Raymond Chandler got a rigidly polarized response, but I love it. [21 Jun 1991, p.3D]