Film

Short Cuts

Robert Altman weaves nine Raymond Carver stories into one sprawling Los Angeles tapestry, following ordinary people through affairs, small cruelties, and one terrible accident over a few overlapping days. It's three unhurried hours of overheard conversation and quiet devastation, closer to mood than plot. Built for patient viewers who love ensemble texture and Altman's roaming camera over tidy narrative arcs.

TMDb rating7.2

If you liked this

Magnolia1999

Paul Thomas Anderson's own multi-strand epic of coincidence and confession is openly indebted to Altman's structure, and it delivers frogs, forgiveness, and one of the most operatic endings in American cinema.

But Its heightened emotion and biblical flourish are almost the opposite of Altman's dry, observational cool.

Magnolia poster

Nashville1975

Altman's earlier masterpiece threads two dozen lives through five days in country-music Nashville, building to a shocking finale that reframes everything you've just watched.

But Even more sprawling and pointedly political than Short Cuts, with a cast so large you may need a scorecard.

Nashville poster

The Player1992

Altman turns the same roaming camera and overlapping dialogue on Hollywood itself, skewering the industry through a murder plot dressed up as studio satire.

But The inside-baseball cameos and studio jokes land harder if you already know your 90s Hollywood gossip.

The Player poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Jindabyne2006no page yet

Adapted from the same Raymond Carver story used for one strand of Short Cuts, 'So Much Water So Close to Home', but stretched into a full mystery-drama about a found body and a town's guilt.

Watching the same Carver premise become an entire film rather than one thread among many shows how much darker and more sustained the guilt feels when it isn't sharing screen time with a dozen other lives.

But It's slow, mournful, and set in the Australian outback, a long way from Altman's sun-bleached LA sprawl.

More like this (8)

Crash2005

Another Los Angeles ensemble of strangers colliding across race and class, sharing Short Cuts' fascination with how a city's cruelty and grace intersect in traffic and small talk.

But Its coincidences are far more emphatic than Carver's, and its moralising lands with far less subtlety.

Crash poster

American Beauty1999

Suburban desperation, quiet affairs, and the slow unraveling of an ordinary family, told with the same eye for the strangeness hiding under domestic routine.

But It's a tighter single-family drama, nowhere near the wide mosaic of lives Short Cuts offers.

American Beauty poster

Traffic2000

Soderbergh weaves several separate storylines around a single subject, the drug trade, with the same confidence that disconnected lives will eventually rhyme and collide.

But It's far more plot-driven and issue-focused where Short Cuts prefers to drift and linger.

Traffic poster

Little Children2006

A suburban ensemble of infidelity, boredom, and buried menace, narrated with a wry detachment that echoes Carver's flat, unsparing prose.

But It's smaller in scale, following a handful of intersecting couples rather than two dozen separate lives.

Little Children poster

Grand Canyon1991no page yet

Another Los Angeles ensemble from the same era, tracing how strangers' fates brush against each other across the city's fault lines of race and privilege.

But More earnest and ultimately hopeful in tone, without Altman's wry, watchful cynicism.

21 Grams2003

Three strangers' lives fracture and interlock after a single accident, sharing Short Cuts' interest in how ordinary people absorb devastating news.

But Its fractured, non-linear editing is a much colder, more clinical technique than Altman's loose naturalism.

21 Grams poster

La Ronde1950

Decades before Altman, Ophuls built an entire film from lovers passing their affairs down a human chain, the same structural conceit of interconnected strangers that Short Cuts later expanded and Americanised.

A witty, elegant precursor to the whole 'interconnected strangers' idea, told in French with a master of ceremonies literally turning the story's carousel from lover to lover.

But It's a 1950 studio film with none of Carver's grit, more charm and irony than genuine ache.

La Ronde poster

Happiness1998no page yet

Another suburban ensemble of quietly desperate lives circling each other, but Solondz pushes the same material into deliberately transgressive black comedy where Altman stayed melancholic and humane.

If Short Cuts' portrait of ordinary, everyday cruelty intrigued rather than repelled you, this pushes the same idea much further, into genuinely disturbing territory, with real craft and nerve.

But It's far more shocking and upsetting, dealing with material designed to disturb rather than move you.

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La Ronde, Crash, Nashville, Paris Je T'aime, Magnolia, Night on Earth