However, in Cookie's Fortune he shows again his formidable talent at filmmaking, hinting that the genius tag might just fit after all.

The titular Cookie is an elderly white woman in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where she decides it's time to join her deceased husband in the afterlife. Unfortunately, her evil niece (played as Cruella DeVil of the South by the increasingly annoying Glenn Close) finds the body. Not wanting a suicide attached to her family name, she arranges things so they look like murder. This leaves Cookie's only friend, a black man who lives in her house and takes care of her, as the suspect. The man, Willis Richland, is played with such seamless subtlety by Charles Dutton that it's jarring to have him transposed against the more theatrical acting of Close, and Altman wisely keeps them in largely separate scenes.

Joining them are Julianne Moore as Close's mentally deficient sister, and Liv Tyler as Moore's anomic daughter. Both give strong performances, but Moore's is truly outstanding--she shines when her character appears as the lead in the Holly Springs Easter production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Here you see Moore's background in classical acting; and since her character is supposed to be a bit insane, she's able to bring this stagey style into the more subtle cinematic scenes without becoming camp.

Its strong performances aside, it's the small touches that make Cookie's Fortune: a roll of police tape unraveling to indicate a love scene, a cabinet door repeatedly creaking open, Glenn Close's guilt comically symbolized by her hand in a cookie jar full of sensitive documents. All of these images, and the slow, steady and inventive camera work that are an Altman trademark, set Cookie's Fortune apart from most movies, which use--even if skillfully--a standard set of shots to convey their stories.