"A magnificent example of European filmmaking, totally undramatic and hypnotically watchable thanks to the extraordinary visual beauty of the photography by Giuseppe Rotunno, the set design by Mario Garbuglia, and the costumes by Piero Tosi, all under the superb control of a great director, Luchino Visconti. An extended time-travel visit to another world, the film is comprised of two major events are a family’s trip from the city to a summer residence and a forty-minute attendance at a ball. It’s probably the finest physical production ever filmed anywhere in Europe or America, a relic of a time when taste, intelligence, and artistry were still in operation, but perhaps even then only in Italy, and only with Visconti. The undisputed master of the costume film (he made only six), this is his masterpiece, dominated by the extraordinarily majestic performance of Burt Lancaster. The tall, athletic, handsome Irish American from 116th Street in Manhattan brought a dignity, strength, and reserve to the part of a Sicilian prince that no one else could have played better. Without him, it would be hard to imagine the film as good."

"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."