Nine reasons why Robert Altman mattered, as assembled by Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere: he was brilliant at ensemble pieces, he was phenomenally “in the zone” from ’70 to ’75, his pioneering use of multi-track, overlapping sound, he always packed lots of visual information into scenes and was sometimes into long takes (like that famous opening shot in The Player), he was a superb genre-deconstuctor, he was great at inspiring and capturing improvisation, he had a running stock company of actors who turned up time and again, he was always pissed off about something and put these beefs into his films, and he never stopped working.