From Robert Altman, a pleasant if overlong divertissement that combines the British class-conscious social satire with the dark-and-stormy-night murder mystery: Evelyn Waugh meets Agatha Christie. In short, Altman hell: etiquette, decorum, hierarchy on the one side, and convention, formula, artifice on the other. However much the director might distance himself from the nitty-gritty of detective work (Stephen Fry's clueless inspector, more Clouseau than Poirot), the body in the study, much like the murdered screenwriter in The Player, gives the movie an impetus often missing in an Altman ensemble piece, and somewhat checks his tendency to run to flab. Every little push helps, because there is very little new (except to Altman) in the class portrait: the upper crusties talking in the presence of servants as if in the presence of furniture, etc. (Nice point of emphasis: the below-stairs people are addressed not by their own names but by the names of their employers.) The inclusion among the houseguests of a Jewish homosexual vegetarian Hollywood producer -- researching his next Charlie Chan opus and observing the ways of the landed aristocracy -- affords Altman an outsider with whom to identify. Or at least -- in a pet expression of an Evelyn Waugh character -- up to a point. (Bob Balaban, who plays the producer, also happens to share the story credit with Altman.) The director's democratic inclinations, sometimes indistinguishable from his misanthropic inclinations, come out clearly in the casting, seeing to it that the servants (Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Kelly Macdonald, Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, Clive Owen, Rupert Grant) are as stellar as their masters (Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Jeremy Northam, Charles Dance, James Wilby). The winsome Macdonald and stoical Owen best survive any misanthropic inclinations. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd