Short Cuts

Shuffling and relocating Raymond Carver’s short stories from the Pacific Northwest to the white suburban sprawl of a Los Angeles teetering on the precipice of one environmental disaster or another, Short Cuts is an epic mosaic of unhappy families in situations that are tragic, comic, and commonplace. As the star-studded cast of twenty-plus main characters intermingles, the messy rhythms of jealousy, grudges, and personal, private power dynamics expose broader societal hierarchies, but never at the expense of specificity, including the film’s “nearly unprecedented depiction of male voyeurism and emotional violence as casual, everyday occurrences” (Michael Fox, SF Weekly).