Like so many pictures about the pictures, The Player is a biting satire of the biz. Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a Hollywood executive who gives dinner speeches about movies being art but works at a studio where endings are unceremoniously tweaked for maximum audience approval ratings — and therefore maximum profits. The greedy corporate Tinseltown of The Player feels very close to the franchise-pumping Tinseltown of today, but there’s enough wit and irony here to keep it from feeling too depressing.

Legendary New Hollywood director Robert Altman packages his critique in familiar clothing: that of a film noir. After receiving threatening postcards from a disgruntled writer he never called back, Griffin takes matters into his own hands and soon finds himself living out the plot of a taut thriller. The Player gets even more deliciously meta than this: nearly every scene contains a winking reference to the movies, and it’d probably be easier to count which stars of past and present don’t show up for a cameo here. What’s more, Altman gives The Player the kind of “happy ending” that Griffin’s studio is always demanding from writers — only here, it’s spun into a bitter commentary on the whole industry. Simply masterful.

The Player’s credits are perhaps the greatest flex the silver screen has ever seen. Altman phoned in just a *few* favors to make the movie’s Hollywood setting credible: around 60 stars — among them Cher, Burt Reynolds, Julia Roberts, Peter Falk, Harry Belafonte Jr., Andie MacDowell, Jack Lemmon, and Elliott Gould — appear as themselves here. It’s a veritable banquet of famous faces, probably more than has ever appeared in a single movie before. Like the Buster Keaton scene in Sunset Boulevard — only on crack — their inclusion is all part of one big in-joke, a layer that makes The Player a thrilling watch in more ways than one.