Nashville

Five days, twenty-four characters and one city. While the country music business in Nashville goes about its work, the campaign of presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker, who never appears on screen, prepares the town for a fundraising gala. Everyone's path meets there. Robert Altman directed. Joan Tewkesbury built the screenplay out of a diary she kept in Nashville in 1973; Altman improvised extensively on top of it. He did not hold conventional auditions, meeting actors one by one instead. Most of the songs were written by the cast. The song Keith Carradine wrote won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It took 11 Golden Globe nominations, a record for a single film, and five Oscar nominations including Best Picture. It entered the National Film Registry in 1992. Roger Ebert described its effect plainly: after seeing it he felt more alive, and felt he understood more about people. The domestic gross was around 10 million dollars. Who it is for: viewers who like multi-strand narrative and are curious about seventies American cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a story that is easy to follow. It runs on overlapping dialogue and deliberately keeps you unsure who is who for the first half hour.