Robert Altman's 3 Women is such a stimulating achievement in cinematic art that it makes one rethink the whole aesthetic of motion pictures…. There is something so utterly unusual about 3 Women that its like may never materialize again, even from Altman. It seems to be located at a fleeting intersection of two awarenesses—the artist's and society's. It is both a dream and a document, a set of facts and a cluster of myths. But the mixture of ingredients produces a very strange concoction, one difficult to describe in terms of the rhetoric of contemporary criticism….

In all of Altman's films, but most decisively in Brewster McCloud, Images, and now 3 Women, his feelings are filtered through a mystical-aesthetical framework that limits a reviewer's sociological speculation. Since I do not find self-consciousness in an artist, even a film artist, to be a crippling disability, Brewster McCloud, Images, and 3 Women are...