Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in Robert Altman’s great, mysterious Western about the opening of a brothel in a Northwest boom town. A landmark film in its use of cinematography and sound for mood and texture. –Alexander Payne

One of the seminal films of New Hollywood, this sui generis western stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie at their height as characters on the fringe of society, figuratively – he’s a gambler and she’s a madam – and literally – the snow-heaped Rocky Mountain setting remains startlingly beautiful. Songs by Leonard Cohen.

“A beautiful pipe dream of a movie: Robert Altman’s fleeting vision of what frontier life might have been, with Warren Beatty as a cocky small-time gambler and Julie Christie as an ambitious madam in the turn-of-the-century Northwest. Delicate, richly textured, and unusually understated, this modern classic is not like any other film. Altman builds a Western town as one might build a castle in the air–and it’s inhabited. His stock company of actors turn up quietly in the new location, as if they were part of a floating crap game, and he creates an atmosphere of living interrelationships.” – Pauline Kael