15 Movies That Say More About Their Makers Than They Realise

5. The Player - Robert Altman

A biting satire of modern Hollywood producers, writers and moguls and a blackly comic noir in which the film's villain is also the protagonist, The Player is essential viewing for those filmgoers who like a slice of venom with their humour. Tim Robbins plays an executive who accidentally kills a screenwriter and hurriedly tries to get away with it while simultaneously trying to discover who his victim was and juggle the demands put upon him by visionary directors, hack writers and other executives. It's difficult not to watch The Player and imagine that this was how the late Robert Altman saw the Hollywood landscape in his time - full of con men and scoundrels, a place where a groundbreaking pitch for a movie's ending becomes a cynical, hackneyed retreading of tired cliches and an exec can literally get away with murder if he's high enough up and is willing to pay the right price. By this point in his career Altman was far past working within the studio system, preferring to work on personal films for smaller budgets, so he wasn't in much danger of being blacklisted for such a cutting remark on his contemporaries.