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"The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of "luxury," the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully, divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater's pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but never surely to call it a luxury." —Henry James, from The Preface to The Wings of the Dove (1909) "[The critic’s] choice of best salami is a picture backed by studio build-up, agreement amongst his colleagues, a layout in Life mag (which makes it officially reasonable for an American award), and a list of ingredients that anyone’s unsophisticated aunt in Oakland can spot as comprising a distinguished film. This prize picture,...

You don’t necessarily associate a filmmaker like John Cassavetes with the likes of Cannon Films, who are more known for a slew of schlocky, low-budget action films from the 1980s than anything that resembles art. Still, studio heads Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus are the folks who bankrolled the “Faces” director’s 1984 drama “Love Streams,” and we have two short glimpses at the film and what went into bringing it to movie screens. The film stars Cassavetes and his wife Gena Rowlands as a brother and sister who care for one another as their lives and relationships crumble around them. More than anything (except maybe money), Golan and Globus wanted critical acclaim, awards and industry respect (read our review of “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films” for a glimpse into their collective psyche), which they hoped working with an auteur like Cassavetes could provide. To record the proceedings for posterity,...

John Cassavetes’ magnificent swan song, Love Streams receives the Criterion treatment this month, an addendum to the previously released five-title collection from the auteur. The film was surrounded and conceived amidst its own set of peculiar circumstances, and thus exhibits its own frenetic energy that sets it apart even within Cassavetes’ own oeuvre. After filming commenced, the director famously receiving a diagnosis that he would only live another six months due to cirrhosis of the liver. Unquestionably, this imbued his strange, wonderful, and reverential exploration of love’s complicated facets with a sharp melancholy. An adaptation of Ted Allan’s stage play, the film won the Golden Bear at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival, but wasn’t marketed properly and received a drowned out theatrical release. The film concerns the reunion of an estranged brother and sister, a pop writer Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes) and recent divorcee, Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands...

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now turns 35 this month and James Gray (The Immigrant) has written an amazing appreciation for Rolling Stone. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Michael Ventura on John Cassavetes's Love Streams (1984), Luc Moullet on Luis Buñuel's Death in the Garden (1956), New York Times profiles of Sam Taylor-Johnson, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Ava DuVernay, Sarah Polley, Lisa Cholodenko and Lana Wachowski, Grady Hendrix on Lee Myung-Se, Glenn Kenny and Ben Sachs on Richard Linklater, Sean Nortz on Michael Wadleigh's Wolfen (1981), Steven Shaviro on Bobcat Goldthwaite's Willow Creek (2013) and much, much more. » - David Hudson...

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now turns 35 this month and James Gray (The Immigrant) has written an amazing appreciation for Rolling Stone. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Michael Ventura on John Cassavetes's Love Streams (1984), Luc Moullet on Luis Buñuel's Death in the Garden (1956), New York Times profiles of Sam Taylor-Johnson, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Ava DuVernay, Sarah Polley, Lisa Cholodenko and Lana Wachowski, Grady Hendrix on Lee Myung-Se, Glenn Kenny and Ben Sachs on Richard Linklater, Sean Nortz on Michael Wadleigh's Wolfen (1981), Steven Shaviro on Bobcat Goldthwaite's Willow Creek (2013) and much, much more. » - David Hudson...

Love Streams

Directed by John Cassavetes

Written by Ted Allan and John Cassavetes

USA, 1984

Love Streams, John Cassavetes’ final film as an actor and penultimate film as director, is also one of his most unusual features. While his distinctive work can oftentimes be divisive, it’s easy to see how this film more than most others could be rather off-putting to those not appreciative of, or even accustomed to, his filmmaking technique.

Cassavetes adapted the film with Ted Allan, based on the latter’s play, and the film’s structure is one of the more vexing of its attributes. Dropped into two parallel lives, with little to no backstory, only gradually are we able to piece together certain details. First, there is Robert Harmon (a worn and weary Cassavetes, his failing health evident). Harmon is a writer, a drunk, and a womanizer, and he is supposedly working on a book about nightlife,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Aug. 12, 2014

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands star in Cassavetes's Love Streams.

The electric filmmaker John Cassavetes (Shadows, Faces) and his brilliant wife and collaborator Gena Rowlands (A Woman Under the Influence) give luminous, fragile performances as two closely bound, emotionally wounded characters who reunite after years apart in the 1984 drama Love Streams.

Exhilarating and risky, mixing sober realism with surreal flourishes, Love Streams is one of Cassavetes’s most truly personal works. It’s a remarkable film that comes at the viewer in a torrent of beautiful, erratic feeling as it examines the nature of love in all its forms.

Criterion’s new DVD and Blu-ray/DVD Combo editions of Love Streams contain the following features:

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray

• New audio commentary featuring writer Michael Ventura

• New video essay on actor...

Criterion has announced their upcoming August 2014 titles, which will begin on August 12 with John Cassavetes' Love Streams in which Cassavetes stars alongside Gena Rowlands as middle-aged brother and sister who find themselves caring for one another after the other loves in their lives abandon them. The film has been fully restored, comes with a new audio commentary featuring writer Michael Ventura, a video essay, interviews and more. Next is Alfonso Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien, the Mexico-set road story starring Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal that put Cuaron on the map. Set for release on August 19, the 2K digital restoration was supervised by director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and approved by Cuar?n and comes with two new making of features, an interview with philosopher Slavoj ?i?ek, deleted scenes, Carlos Cuaron's 2002 short film You Owe Me One and more. Also on August 19 comes Pedro Almodovar's Tie Me Up!

Sitting between the uneven Husbands and the economic beauty of A Woman Under the Influence, Minnie and Moskowitz was John Cassavetes sixth time directing a feature and like most of his work he does so with confidence and a singular vision.

Minnie (Gena Rowlands) is a museum curator, attractive and reasonably well off. Her love life isn’t too good though and after the man she is seeing, the already married Jim (John Cassavetes), cruelly dumps her in front of his son she is immediately set up on a disastrous blind date. Following this blind date debacle, a particularly amusing scene featuring Val Avery as the hapless suitor Zelmo, Minnie runs into Seymour Moskowitz.

Whilst Seymour might not seem on the surface like much of a catch, his own mother points out that “he parks cars for a living!”, he is doggedly persistent and clearly infatuated with Minnie. So begins their relationship,...

An emerging theme of the Ted conference, which started today in Long Beach, CA, is the value of the tactile & embodied. Virtual reality has become a commodity; real reality is at a premium.

"People will always need to touch, feel, & experience," says Michael Ventura, the CEO of Sub Rosa, the interactive agency creating the mega-versions of trade show booths by the likes of Pepsi, Gucci, and Ge. "Images on a screen can only take you so far."

The point is brought home not only by the hundreds of A-list flesh-and-blood attendees (I've spotted Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Caterina Fake & Stephen Wolfram so far) who are still, by and large, exchanging paper business cards; but by displays like Ge's new Lunar InBody physical scanner, taking the weight and body composition of Ted attendees (currently averaging a svelte 23.6 Bmi, several points below the Us average); a 3-D printer made by an Israeli...

If there's only one thing John Cassavetes' films are known for, it's for the performances of his actors. The loose realism of the acting, filmed in his often bare cinema-verite style, is something that's become a signature of Cassavetes work, especially in heavily performance-centric films like Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence. Maybe because of this, he's often misconstrued as the master of improvisation, when in truth his works are often heavily scripted. His method, instead, was to let his actors bring their own take to the characters and improvise during rehearsals, some of which would then be incorporated into the shooting script..

This is why Cassavetes is probably the most interesting director to study on the set. Michael Ventura's great documentary I'm Almost Not Crazy is a good place to start, but it was only ever released in 1989 on a long out-of-print VHS. Luckily, it's available...