Robert Altman's Nashville, on Criterion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

One of my favorite movies of all time, and in my view the best movie ever made about America, is now, at long last, out on Blu-ray:

Nashville, directed by Robert Altman, written by Joan Tewkesbury, and (like so many Altman films) starring a huge cast including Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Shelley Duvall, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Murphy, and Lily Tomlin.

I'd been waiting for, oh, I don't know how many years for a special edition, and then of course for the Blu-ray, and to make it even better this glorious edition is from the incomparable Criterion Collection, which means it looks and sounds better than ever and comes with fantastic special features. Even more than Harold Lloyd's Safety Last!, Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama, Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu, and the Pierre Etaix box set, this is the Criterion release I was looking forward to the most in 2013.

It's just about as good as it gets. And I don't even like country music.

Here are the original trailer from 1975 and Criterion's Three Reasons: