Gosford Park

“No director has ever been better than Altman at providing the audience with bearings to find its way through a large cast” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). Boasting a veritable who’s who of British acting royalty (Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren both received Oscar nominations), Gosford Park is classic Agatha Christie with more than a nod to Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game. In 1932 the wealthy and their servants descend on the titular English manor for a hunting party that quickly transforms into a comic and biting murder mystery. The impeccable upstairs-downstairs “production design conveys a disorienting, almost Escher-like labyrinth of hierarchies within hierarchies” (Dennis Lim, Village Voice).