the film is almost suffocatingly long, even though its ideas about actors, acting and real life are among Cassavetes's most intriguing.
Comment
06/15/07
Opening Night (1977)
94 %
Reviews Counted: 16 Fresh: 15 Rotten:1 Average Rating: 7.8/10
Rated: 15
Runtime: 2 hrs 26 mins
Theatrical Release: 15-06-2007
Synopsis: John Cassavetes, known for his in-depth explorations of individuals who appear to be on the brink of sanity, paints another powerful portrait with OPENING NIGHT. Gena Rowlands stars as Myrtle Gordon, a Broadway actress rehearsing for her latest play, SECOND WOMAN, which concerns a woman... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Paul Stewart
Reviews
1 - 16 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
As you might expect, coming from indie godfather John Cassavetes, 1977’s Opening Night is something else, a weird, raw, ragged portrait of an actress on the verge of a
06/15/07
Top Critic
The film of the week is 30 years old and hasn't aged a day. It's John Cassavetes's Opening Night, a truly mesmerising study of anxiety and identity crisis in theatreland.
06/15/07
Top Critic
Woody Allen said that he could watch a Bergman movie and feel himself gripped as if by a thriller; that's how I felt watching this restored version of John Cassavetes's 1977 picture Opening Night
06/15/07
Top Critic
The camerawork is instinctively fluid, the performances savage – this is one of the best films about theatre ever made.
06/15/07
Top Critic Top Critic
At once a lament to the ravages of age and an examination of those tiny foibles which separate reality from dramatic artifice, it’s a baffling and intricate film which, although light on conventional pleasures, still manages to provoke and beguile.
01/26/06
Top Critic
Opening Night is a film so ambitious that it's hard to imagine anyone less accomplished and passionate than John Cassavetes even attempting it.
05/24/03
Top Critic
As densely layered and difficult as anything else Cassavetes ever directed, as dense as any American film from the 1970s.
06/23/08
Another of Cassavetes' puzzling, personal, neurotic, and often brilliant productions that would have benefited from editing with a scythe.
08/30/06
Top Critic
Rowlands sings a different kind of mad song in Opening Night, playing a diva-like actress preparing a part about aging that haunts her, at times literally, with a vision of lost youth.
02/14/05
The scenes in which Myrtle consults first one and then another spiritualist are typical of Cassavetes's genius in filming madness.
01/01/00
Top Critic1 - 16 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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