Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Celia A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

gavin6942 An actress (Gena Rowlands) suffers an emotional uproar in her personal life after a fan dies trying to see her.The play-within-a-play device does not always work, and can sometimes lead to confusion. Here, it works precisely because it leads to a degree of confusion. When does the acting stop and the real living begin? Does the acting ever stop? Cassavetes and Rowlands are powerful actors, and adding Ben Gazzara to the mix never hurts (he truly deserves to be better known, not just as a seedy character actor). The film is haunting, and it looks at aging in an entirely different way than anyone has before.

erictopp The performances (how much was improvised?) save this film but it is deeply flawed.The main problem that I had with this movie is that the characters are so unappealing. Myrtle is so difficult to work with, it is strange how *everyone* from the director down to the doorman is in love with her. And Manny and co are no better - they blithely drive away from a fatal car accident - the dinner at the restaurant must have been really good! The plot is very contrived - since Myrtle obviously hates the play why did she sign up for it? And what director would not have an understudy ready to fill in on opening night for such an unreliable and unstable actress? There are much better films out there with the "performer goes crazy" theme - watch those instead.

sol- Full of interesting ideas and really rather chilling at times, this account of a mental breakdown is fascinating to watch, with Gena Rowlands a glorious choice for the lead. It is in the way that Rowlands is able to carry emotion on her face that makes her performance so stunning, and along with some well used music and effective close-up photography, it is an intriguing piece of cinema, even if awkwardly very melodramatic at times and a tad hard to digest. The on and off-stage action in the protagonist's life is mixed together, and it is sort of muddled in this sense, though perhaps only as muddled as her mind is. The film poses such interesting questions about how much one should or does care, it portrays mental illness, and, it also has some insight into theatre production. It is very good stuff and only really brought down by being fatally overlong, with the content stretched to its limits.

Pokerface11 Opening Night is my favorite Cassavetes, and I feel it is my duty to debunk the notion that those or any of his films aside from Shadows was strictly improvised. In fact, his films were tightly scripted after actor improvisation was used to contribute to his ideas. The coherence of a film like Opening Night, the development of the themes of aging, vanity, and hope, could not just spring from the improvisational head of even the very fine actors in the movie. If you pay attention to the dialogue (outside of the lines in the play), it is obvious that much care was taken to craft them (e.g., the scene where Myrtle explains to the playwright what problems she is having with the character and script).