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John Cassavetes' Faces is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: "Here!" It would be a triumphant shout.

This is one of the great alternative masterpieces of the American cinema. In many ways, Cassavetes' most important film.

Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes' films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era's jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory.

A really important movie about the American class, generation and marriage abyss.

There is a lot of joy in Faces—John Cassavetes’ second real “Cassavetes” film, 10 years after Shadows—and there is also a lot of anger. Often there’s a drunken combination of the two. But no matter what emotion dominates, the movie itself has the same edge, the same itchiness. It’s constantly scratching its own skin.

Though it is sometimes a tedious viewing experience, its improvisational and documentary techniques are rewarding.

The plot is bare and a little cliched, but the film's dramatic scenes, usually shot with a roving camera and lighted in fairly crude ways, are realistically, almost voyeuristicly, staged. [04 Jul 1991, p.13]

Cassavetes didn’t improvise, and Faces was scripted, but many of the film’s scenes still have the feel of conversations happening right in front of you, with all the imperfections and digressions and looseness of the everyday.

Working out of themselves (as his actors do), they can't create characters. Their performances don't have enough range, so we tend to tire of them before the movie is finished. Still, a lot of people found this psychodrama agonizingly true and beautiful.

Faces is a long, long (at least an hour too long) look at a 36-hour splitup in the 14-year marriage of a middle-class couple. At least John Cassavetes, who also wrote the screenplay, describes them as middle-class.