Last year, we lost one of the greatest of all screen performers: Gena Rowlands (1930-2024). Not a box-office star, Rowlands nevertheless racked up more than 30 notable film roles in a career that stretched across more than five decades. Of these, the parts she embodied for her writer-director husband John Cassavetes are the bedrock of her reputation, and the reason why for so many of her peers she is the most inspiring and influential American actress of the past half century.
Much more than a muse, Rowlands was a versatile, courageous and profound actor, and their films together — including Faces (April 25, 29), A Woman Under the Influence (April 27 & May 1), Minnie and Moskowitz (May 4 & 6), Gloria (May 11 & 13), Opening Night (May 18 & 20) and Love Streams (May 25 & 27) — confront the fraught complexity of relationships with a candor that feels like revelation. Through Rowlands, Cassavetes was able to write about vulnerability, loneliness, and aging, but she also showed him strength, determination, love… In other words, Gena made John a more complete artist.
As Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, “Rowlands and Cassavetes changed American cinema, and they also, as importantly, changed the women in it, making films that spoke to their liberated moment. Cassavetes may not have been a feminist, strictly speaking. Yet he and Rowlands made some of the greatest, truest films about women.”
Also screening: Another Woman (June 1 & 3) and Night on Earth (June 1 & 3).
Faces
Ten years after his landmark debut, Shadows, John Cassavetes returned to the indie model, self-financing this wrenching portrait of the sexual mores and miseries of American middle class. Gena Rowlands is luminous as Jeannie, the film's emotional barometer.
A Woman Under the Influence
Gena Rowlands is extraordinary in this painful and compassionate trial of love, the most intense and essential movie from legendary independent filmmaker John Cassavetes. "The toughest of all great American films." Kent Jones
Minnie and Moskowitz
John Cassavetes' deliciously witty take on Hollywood romance is a modern screwball comedy, a mismatched love story between a car park attendant (Seymour Cassel) and a museum administator (Gena Rowlands) who believes herelf to be too good for him.
Opening Night
Gena Rowlands plays aging stage actress Myrtle Gordon in this self-reflexive ghost story by John Cassavetes.
Love Streams
The last movie Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes made together is an eccentrically beautiful, painful piece about a writer (Cassavetes) broken out of his self-imposed exile by the arrival of a son he doesn't know, and a sister he hasn't seen in years.
Another Woman
Gena Rowlands as philosophy teacher whose meticulously controlled life begins to unravel after she starts to eavesdrop on a psychotherapist's sessions.
Night on Earth
Gena Rowlands takes a cab driven by Winona Ryder in this low-key charmer from Jim Jarmusch, one of five taxi rides around the globe, each ending with a sliver of insight and understanding.