Average Rating: 7.8/10
Reviews Counted: 21
Fresh: 20 | Rotten: 1
Opening Night is as dense and difficult as one would expect from John Cassavetes, but even the director's detractors will be unable to deny the power of Gena Rowlands' performance.
Average Rating: N/A
Critic Reviews: 3
Fresh: 3 | Rotten: 0
Opening Night is as dense and difficult as one would expect from John Cassavetes, but even the director's detractors will be unable to deny the power of Gena Rowlands' performance.
liked it
Average Rating: 4.1/5
User Ratings: 3,903
John Cassavetes' Opening Night stars Gena Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes) as end-of-tether Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon. She is about to open in a play written by her old friend Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell), but a series of pre-show setbacks and disasters threaten to destroy not only the production but Myrtle's sanity. The actress is especially rattled when one of her staunchest fans dies in an accident. In the face of bleak reality, just how important is the old "show must go on" ethic? Supporting
Dec 22, 1977 Limited
Jun 29, 1998
Faces Distributing Corporation
All Critics (23) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (21) | Rotten (1) | DVD (3)
Gena Rowlands turns in another virtuoso performance as the troubled actress. Cassavetes' highly personal work will please his coterie of enthusiasts, but for general audiences it will be viewed as shrill, puzzling, depressing and overlong.
John Cassavetes was unique in his visions and his films.
Juggling onstage and offstage action, Cassavetes makes this a fascinating look at some of the internal mechanisms and conflicts that create theatrical fiction.
The scenes in which Myrtle consults first one and then another spiritualist are typical of Cassavetes's genius in filming madness.
Intriguing but enigmatic backstage theater melodrama with shades of All About Eve.
The unpredictability of Rowlands' character brings one surprise after another to the narrative as the other characters scramble to accommodate or cajole her, and the surprises are often as funny as they are intensely dramatic.
As per usual it features a superb cast, including the ever-present Gena Rowlands, who successfully improvise their way the film.
As densely layered and difficult as anything else Cassavetes ever directed, as dense as any American film from the 1970s.
the film is almost suffocatingly long, even though its ideas about actors, acting and real life are among Cassavetes's most intriguing.
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
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.
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
The camerawork is instinctively fluid, the performances savage - this is one of the best films about theatre ever made.
Opening Night is a truly grand unveiling of our innermost fears.
Another of Cassavetes' puzzling, personal, neurotic, and often brilliant productions that would have benefited from editing with a scythe.
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.
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.
Cassavetes is probably the coolest filmmaker of all time. His films are like having a whiskey and a cigar in some quiet little jazz club somewhere. This cast is to die for, Rowlands, Gazzara, Blondell and Cassavetes are brilliant. The improvisation isn't always on the ball and although I enjoyed the 'blink and you'll
October 2, 2009Super Reviewer
Cassavetes gritty feeling blends well with backstage drama. Gena Rowlands is great wonderfully backed by Joan Blondell in one of her best latter day performances.
April 22, 2008
Super Reviewer
| 25% | Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Par... |
| 83% | Puss in Boots |
| 94% | Moneyball |
| 59% | Real Steel |
| 84% | Contagion |
| 83% | Puss in Boots |
| 68% | Tower Heist |
| 90% | Martha Marcy May Marlene |
| 33% | London Boulevard |
| 17% | The Son of No One |
Puss in Boots and J. Edgar
50 best-reviewed Best Picture nominees
Ranking the 75 best animated movies ever!
Download the official PDF!