"For the four years between 1971 and 1975 one could say that Robert Altman didn’t touch the ground. I am strangely less sensitive to his previous work, including M*A*S*H, and what followed (too baroque for my taste), but Thieves Like Us, California Split, The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are the great successes of a cinema free of all constraints and carried by the best of the spirit of their time. It is hard to believe today that these films were actually financed by a studio and were even popular successes. Nashville is the culmination of this rather miraculous cycle. And even its transcendence – being a sort of “total-film” – its timelessness grasps the American spirit in a way that few films have. One feels at times it veers toward caricature that is a little cynical – Geraldine Chaplin, a very young Jeff Goldblum – which gives a glimpse of what will follow it; but for the most part, the film is in a state of grace, at once funny, cruel, profound and always seeking human and social truths – with a scalpel."