As the film progresses, the truth comes to the surface, and it hits with bludgeoning force.

| Jun 6, 2024

Tying back to A Woman Under the Influence... [Cassavetes] explores what happens when women don't play their prescribed roles.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 23, 2019

Rowlands takes the movie by the throat...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 14, 2019

Opening Night is exactly the sort challenging film that we should consider when examining the adventurous breadth of a genre that cannot, and should not, be nailed down by any simple definition or formula.

| Oct 16, 2018

Cassavetes's most cleverly constructed film is also a definitive lesson in the death-defying, all-consuming art of acting, proof of a madness beyond the Method.

| Jul 5, 2016

An occasionally infuriating but ultimately affecting drama.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 18, 2014

Intriguing but enigmatic backstage theater melodrama with shades of All About Eve.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 11, 2008

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.

| Jul 28, 2008

John Cassavetes was unique in his visions and his films.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2008

As per usual it features a superb cast, including the ever-present Gena Rowlands, who successfully improvise their way the film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 28, 2008

Juggling onstage and offstage action, Cassavetes makes this a fascinating look at some of the internal mechanisms and conflicts that create theatrical fiction.

| Jul 28, 2008

As densely layered and difficult as anything else Cassavetes ever directed, as dense as any American film from the 1970s.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jun 23, 2008

the film is almost suffocatingly long, even though its ideas about actors, acting and real life are among Cassavetes's most intriguing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2007

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

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2007

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.

| Jun 15, 2007

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

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2007

The camerawork is instinctively fluid, the performances savage - this is one of the best films about theatre ever made.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2007

Opening Night is a truly grand unveiling of our innermost fears.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2007

Another of Cassavetes' puzzling, personal, neurotic, and often brilliant productions that would have benefited from editing with a scythe.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 30, 2006

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.

| Jan 26, 2006