Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #77: The Player (1992).

Before he served life in The Shawshank Redemption, directed a story of a Dead Man Walking and won an Oscar as a child abuse survivor in Mystic River, a slick Tim Robbins was upcoming Hollywood studio executive Griffin Mill. Griffin spends his days sifting through one derivative pitch after another and staving off threats from a particularly upset, rejected screenwriter. Then one night after being ambushed, he accidentally murders one writer he ignored: David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio). Now before the media turns this tragedy into a circus, Griffin must do everything he can to save his own life and career. In the process, he negotiates with a disagreeable LA police consultant (Whoopi Goldberg at her sassy best), shacks up with Kahane's widow June (Greta Scacchi) and, in an ironic twist of fate, finds himself involved in the studio's production of a murder trial drama directed by a passionately non-mainstream Englishman (Richard E. Grant). But will he get away with murder? And who involved in making the movie will have their way?

The Player was a successful comeback for director Robert Altman after his huge 1980 bomb Popeye, and he gets deeper under the veil and skins of Hollywood than maybe any other filmmaker has. Working from Michael Tolkin's incisive and knowing adaptation of his own novel and maybe even his own experiences in Tinseltown during those hard years, Altman's approach is merciless and he paces it throughout with real assurance and awareness. He also, quite fittingly, uses stylised editing and an ominous score to reflect how show business can prioritise superficiality and deliberately dispose of trends and stars as quickly as it produces them. This wise technique makes the movie's openly cynical tone and messages even more entertainingly conveyed, and Altman and Tolkin were both nominated for Oscars.

And like practically every Altman work, The Player has an enormous cast, bursting at the seams with surprising cameos featuring everybody from Susan Sarandon to Burt Reynolds, all of them taking two big risks here. Robbins deservedly won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor gong for his icily charming work as Mill, but there's not a false note to be seen among of the cast here. You'll finish The Player wondering quite how it ever got made (Hollywood has surely never been satirised so scathingly), but it was made, and brilliantly so, and it's arguably more relevant today than in 1992.