YouHeart I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Blake Peterson Robert Altman can be many things. He can be warped, sarcastic, biting — but he can also be affectionate and understanding. His best films often combine these characteristics with slippery perfection, especially when putting the satirical "The Player" or the balmy "Thieves Live Us" into consideration. I, however, prefer him when he's gazing upon his characters with head-shaking fondness. Certainly, "Cookie's Fortune" isn't comprised of saintly characters — but unlike "Short Cuts" or "Nashville", only a few of the players are wholeheartedly f-cked up, giving us less time to analyze potentially devilish psyches and more to relish the tight, almost familial bonds between the ever compelling characters. It's one of his most impeccably entertaining films.Set in a minuscule Southern town defined by colorful people, sweaty heat, and catfish, in that order, "Cookie's Fortune" details the sudden death of Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal), an elderly widow tired of living alone and tired of her mundane life. So without much thought, she grabs a gun out of her impressive arms closet, flops onto her bed, places a pillow over her face, and shoots herself in the head. Her niece, Camille (Glenn Close), won't have it. A wannabe playwright with a fondness for cranking up her every emotion by a few thousand notches, she is disgusted by her aunt's carelessness: it will bring shame upon the family, and, most notably, it may even upstage her upcoming play. Consumed with dramatic audacity, she arrives at the scene and decides it would be best to make the suicide actually look like a murder: why not? She runs around the house pretending she's a giallo fiend, breaking windows, stealing valuables, eventually running out the back and throwing the gun into some bushes like Joan Crawford might have during her 1950s-set film noir years. She persuades her dimwitted sister, Cora (Julianne Moore), to go along with the charade, not realizing that covering up a suicide isn't just some cutesy thing mercurial nieces do for fun. It could lead to, you know, trouble.Immediately, Cookie's best friend and confidant, Willis (Charles S. Dutton), is locked up at the local sheriff's office under suspicion, Cora's estranged daughter, Emma (Liv Tyler), keeping him company while also utilizing the opportunity to have closet sex with her cop boyfriend (Chris O'Donnell) to pass the time. No one, including the men who arrested Willis in the first place, believe he's the murderer — which casts further suspicion onto Cookie's weirdo nieces.But "Cookie's Fortune" isn't a conventional crime movie, preferring to use its titular figure's sudden offing as a way of throwing the Mississippi set town off course and seeing how its residents handle the travesty. Anne Rapp's screenplay always retains a certain sort of comic lushness that makes the intersecting situations ceaselessly delightful while also maintaining a sort of broad realism. These people certainly could exist — not all realism based films have to be dirt-on-the-ground miserable — and "Cookie's Fortune" is all the more fun for it. Close is a bundle of laughs, delivering off-color lines like an unintentional comedy pro, Neal ensuring why Cookie was such a vital part of her town's life. Dutton is one of Altman's sweetest scene-stealers, and Tyler, in a terrific performance, is a consistent pleasure as a free-spirit that seasons the oft conservative setting of the film.Most consider "Cookie's Fortune" to be minor Altman, but I think it's underrated Altman. He regularly goes deep with his films, finding ways to mirror the lives of his flawed characters with our own. But "Cookie's Fortune" is such a delicacy because it's breezy, amusing without any existential kinks. He sets scenes with a sort of nostalgic reverie, figuring that small town America isn't all "Twin Peaks" and can still preserve the same sort of complicated magic of a '70s era sitcom. We watch the characters converse wanting to be a part of their community, either because the friendships seem everlasting or because the disdainfulness is comical rather than harmful. Most would want to get out of the town "Cookie's Fortune" sets itself in right away — not me. I'd like to hole up there for a while, collect my thoughts and have conversation about the good things in life instead of the high drama that shapes the metropolises of America. Lightweight Altman may not be everyone's favorite, but I tend to prefer a grizzled filmmaker when he's enjoying himself. So maybe "Cookie's Fortune" is an accidental masterpiece — it's an underrated moment in his lustrous career.

lasttimeisaw COOKIE'S FORTUNE is maestro Robert Altman's lesser known work, an outlandish comedy about an intrigue deriving from Cookie (Neal)'s suicide in a small town in Mississippi. It is a sterling ensemble piece and Anne Rapp's satirical script excels in mockery of the Presbyterian church and the provincial racism while Altman is mostly at ease with the straightforward storyline. Cookie is an elderly widow, apparently quite wealthy, has built a close friendship with the handyman Willis (Dutton), but every family has some loose screws, her two nieces Camille (Close) and Cora (Moore), are church fanatics, barely take care of her, the only person she cares in the family is Emma (Tyler), Cora's rebellious daughter. Everything turns havoc when Camille is the first one discovers the scene, since "suicide is disgrace" for her, she destroys Cookie's suicide note and makes it look like a break-in and murder scene, with Cora as the witness. The interesting part is the sibling relationship, Camille principally dominates Cora's life, she is currently preparing a revamped play of Oscar Wilde's SALOME for the church and let her half-witted sister as the lead. So Camille has to brainwash Cora on the spot to dragoon her into believing what a sin Cookie has done and they should conform to the same testimony. So the death is investigated as a murder case, and needless to say Willis becomes the soft target for suspicion as a rich widow's black handyman who doesn't have a manifest alibi and whose fingerprints are all over the "murder weapon". But Willis has the unconditional aid from Emma and most of townsfolk who know the relationship Cookie and Willis. Clearly, Camille is in no mood for clarifying Wilis' suspicion, as she has already hogged the house of a "crime scene" as her own property, until Cookie's will (which is fortunately oblivious to her) comes into light, an unknown family secret is revealed and a blood-type analysis diverts the suspicion towards Camille. Then arrives the most satisfying part when Camille's fate is totally at the hands of Cora's testimony, Julianne Moore again proves her superlative dexterity by enforcing a genuine ambiguousness of Cora's "revenge" highlighted by her inscrutable delivery, it consummates such a rewarding viewing experience between Moore's passive submission and Close's OTT aggression.This film is also Patricia Neal's major big screen appearance in her later years, nostalgia strikes, Cookie is a woman who has blissfully fulfilled her mission in life and has no regret in joining her late husband in the paradise, Neal nabs a doddering front of senility, and furthermore, camouflages her unexpected decision with a cordial rapport between her and Willis. Dutton outstandingly offers Willis a spontaneously carefree nature while Liv Tyler's Emma is a too-good-to-be-true exemplar of a younger generation. The only incongruity rises from O'Donnell's rookie officer Jason, who is a total non-starter apart from being Emma's love interest and smooching on each other every time their eyes click. To all appearances, COOKIE'S FORTUNE is Altman in his most laid-back fashion, planted in the southern soil, lyrically jazzy and beguilingly hilarious, it is also a showcase for his main players (Moore and Neal are my pick, with Dutton and Close closely behind), however beneath the surface, it sharply encapsulates the vexing status quo presided by narrow- minded prejudice and vacuous brainwashing under the name of religion. Align with my personal taste, the film is my guilty pleasure from a revered filmmaker, and is entitled to appeal to a wider-ranging movie devotees.

Rockwell_Cronenberg Cookie's Fortune is another ensemble character piece from Robert Altman, although it's of a lot less magnitude than some of his previous works. The story centers around a group of citizens in the quaint town of Holly Springs, who are thrown into disarray by the sudden death of Cookie Orcutt (Patricia Neal). Altman's scope is much more intimate than some of his other ensemble pieces, and it fits the characters nicely. The whole thing, accompanied by a nice blues score, has this quaint and relaxed atmosphere to it. This makes the film move by at a slower pace, but I never really felt like it dragged or anything, it just sort of coasted along.There are several characters that we focus on, from Cookie's nieces Camille and Cora (Glenn Close and Julianne Moore) to her best friend Willis (Charles S. Dutton) to the police (Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty and a few others) to Cora's estranged daughter Emma (Liv Tyler), who has coincidentally just strolled back into town after being gone for a while. Cookie's death sends waves through the small community and turns everyone's situations upside down, resulting in comedic strides and a police investigation. When focusing on the individual characters, I definitely enjoyed myself most of the time, especially when it came to the erratic and revoltingly vain Camille (played with utter theatrical delight by Close) and the eternally laid-back Willis, but I don't think the script managed to bring the characters together in an entirely fluid manner.This especially became a problem when the film was focused on Camille and Cora, who felt as though they were in an entirely different film. The majority of it had that bluesy, Southern atmosphere to it but then you get to the scenes with the two of them and it's like they're in a Tennesse Williams play. The characters are supposed to be a contrast to the rest of the ensemble, but the tones of their sections don't mesh at all with the rest of the film and it's quite distracting. The cast for the most part does a fine job, Close being the only one who impressed me on any major level, but Tyler and O'Donnell stick out like sore thumbs, the flattest pieces of wood in an otherwise quite alive ensemble.I think my main problem with it though came from the final act, which is just a bizarre disaster. Out of nowhere the investigation starts turning up revelations of different familial bonds and lies from the past, but they truly come out of nowhere and ultimately add nothing to the film. It gets so confusing and incoherent in the final act, I don't have a clue what possessed writer Anne Rapp. It drags the film down considerably, but the rest of it was alright, if relatively insignificant.

fedor8 Altman should go into retirement, as should Scorsese, and all the other former great directors who waste everyone's time with their new material.This overlong, unfunny near-mess starts off with a half-hour of pure tedium, in a sort of "Driving Miss Daisy" vein; with an old woman and her loyal black friend. Absolutely nothing happens in this part of the movie. I wish it had stayed that way, because once things start happening that is when the movie gets really annoying. (Like Sting's famous song-line: "Life was easy when it was boring", or "This film was easier when it was boring".) The overly familiar plot – already milked dry by the self-copying Hitchcock - of an innocent man accused of murder is just too stupid. It also sinks any chance that the gags and the humour might have; but the jokes are mostly mediocre so it doesn't matter. The other major problem with the movie is the rather "blah" cast: Julianne Moore, Glenn Close, O'Donnell, that "country" singer, and worst of all - Liv Tyler. While Moore is convincing as a semi-retarded woman, Close is simply annoying in yet another wicked-witch-from-the-South role. O'Donnell is typically bland, while Tyler is not only awfully miscast but a bad actress, as well. For Altman to cast her as some white-trash Southern girl is an insane move. Charles Dutton has a very cliché role: he is ultra-kind, pure goodness and is intellectually superior to just about everyone - without feeling that way. And what an annoying plot-point in the kid's father not wanting to listen to what the kid had witnessed. Plus, there is that annoying sporadic schmaltziness that any movie can do without. What a waste of time.