The film seems to me to go badly wrong... The optimistic ending, in the circumstances, is a joke.

| Feb 25, 2025

Not a scene is wasted in 2 hours and 30 minutes of drama, and it is pure joy to watch such accomplished actors work with all the time they need for fully fleshed performances.

| Oct 11, 2023

Cassavetes has gone so far over to the most literal-minded Laing position that the society he shows us is implausible -- a society of boorish people with such limited awareness that they're barely human.

| Sep 27, 2023

Regarded by some as John Cassavetes’ masterpiece, it’s also not a bad place for Cassavetes newcomers to start.

| Original Score: A | Nov 29, 2022

John Cassavetes’ most revered film, “A Woman Under the Influence”, is one of cinema’s exemplary works of realism.

| Oct 14, 2022

The film's incidents... look and sound like improvisations in which a dreary little situation is stretched, worried, reiterated until any spectator with a sense of the value of his time must turn as blue in the face as the hero's collar.

| Jul 30, 2020

his unsparing actors' tour de force (Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk at their career peaks) reveals just how much today's Sundance family dramas owe to indie movement founder John Cassavetes.

| Jun 18, 2020

What keeps this from being one more soap opera is the superb acting of Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk.

| May 20, 2020

His most devastating film to date, it proves Cassavetes is a master of sensitivity, intimacy and passion on the screen.

| Dec 9, 2019

The filmmaking represents the raw power independent [cinema] can have.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 15, 2019

'Be yourself,' Nick implores Mabel. But how do you be yourself if you have no longer have a self?

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 2, 2019

Mental illness as theater.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 21, 2019

It should be seen for its undeniably brilliant elements.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 7, 2019

Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen.

| Feb 7, 2019

Like steep hill climbs, John Cassavetes's films can be jolly hard work, but the view from the top is worth it.

| Feb 7, 2019

A Woman Under the Influence essentially ends with a shrug, its cynical ending a statement of pointlessness and hopelessness and the futility of railing against an imposed social structure.

| Feb 7, 2019

I liked that the film never reduces what's going on in that shaken family to one thing.

| Jan 3, 2019

Magnifies in squirmy detail the efforts of a couple to cope with her -- or should that be their? -- mental meltdown.

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

Despite the fact that there's a lot of technique on display here, the film still described as cinéma vérité, which I suppose is a testament to how raw and emotional it all feels.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 28, 2013

The primal violence that binds men and woman has rarely been evoked as plausibly or intensely as in this 1974 drama.

| May 3, 2013