Nashville

Nashville, Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece set over five days at a country and western festival, is full of contradictions. It’s an epic, running two and a half hours with a cast of two dozen principle actors, yet it’s constructed entirely from small, personal dramas. Each character, be they a C&W diva (Ronee Blakley), a ditzy BBC reporter (Geraldine Chaplin) or a runaway housewife (Barbara Harris), feels fully formed; their individual vignettes, all vital within the giant tapestry, build to a compelling state-of-the-nation address to a country still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate.

This is a jigsaw movie that breaks all of cinema’s rules (of narrative, sound, structure) but within the loose sprawl Altman never loses sight of his characters, their passions and their heartbreak. The tunes – it’s basically a musical – are first-rate too. If a fire was ever to engulf the American Film Institute’s archive, this should be one of the first prints pulled from the flames. [Jamie Dunn]