BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Boris_Day Love Streams feels like the last in an unofficial trilogy of films where Gena Rowlands played "women under the influence" for Cassavetes. Like in A Woman Under the Influence she plays a woman who appears to love too much and feel too intensely, which alienates her from her family. As with Opening Night Cassavetes departs further from his naturalistic , hanheld camera style and he gives us a view of the inside workings of his protagonists mind. We see things only Rowlands' characters see. Unlike with the two earlier films, here gets a kindred spirit in Cassavetes' equally troubled character.For the first half the film cuts back and forth between two protagonists, one a womanising, insomniac alcoholic writer, the other a just divorced mother with mental health issues. Having lost custody of her daughter, she returns from a manic jaunt round Europe. Cassavetes and Rowlands characters meet an hour into the film (the nature or their relationship doesn't become clear till later) and they both increasingly lose control, till it all ends with a small menagerie of animals and a surreal musical sequence worthy of David Lynch.Absolutely amazing and never miserable as it's also darkly funny and ultimately a strangely hopeful film. A sequence where Cassavetes' absent father is asked to look after his eight year old son for a day by one of his ex-wives, gets the kid drunk and takes him to Vegas is an appalling, yet wickedly funny depiction of truly terrible parenting.Rowlands is one of the greatest of all screen actors and she is still criminally underrated. She played emotionally/mentally vulnerable women without a shred of sentimentality or self-pity. There is a defiant toughness to her characters which makes her as electrifying as Brando at his best. Despite playing several characters with mental health issues for Cassavetes, she never allowed herself to come across as victimised. Awards voters love an obvious victim turn, so this may be why she's never been properly recognised by the Academy. Here she plays a woman who loves too much, which becomes too much to deal with for everyone but Cassavetes' equally damaged character. With an actress who would have made less interesting choicest, this could have come off as maudlin but Rowlands' performance undermines any emotional vanity or sign-posting. She never tells you how you should feel about her characters, which is what makes her so compelling.Cassavetes too gives a fantastic performance. The characters in his films feel so alive and unpredictable, there is constant tension, it feels like anything could happen. Cassavetes, the godfather of the American indie film, at this point had abandoned the cinema verite style he had basically invented. The film has a dreamlike quality, features a shape shifting dog and ends with a mini-opera.

Red-125 "Love Streams," directed by and starring John Cassavetes, is a showpiece for the wonderful acting of Gena Rowlands. Having said that, I'll add my opinion that, other than Ms. Rowlands' superb talent, nothing much about the film is worth seeing. The film gives us a few days in the life of Robert Harmon (Cassavetes.) Harmon is an author--although we never see him writing--who is intelligent, handsome, and rich. He's also a womanizer--often with four of five women in a night--a drunk, and a thoughtless SOB.Meanwhile, Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands), his sister, is described as a "kook" in some of the movie's promotional material. She is not a kook. She's a troubled woman with serious mental health problems that appear to represent classic bipolar disorder.Harmon loves his sister, but isn't prepared to help her in any way other than offering her his home as a place to stay. Meanwhile, he's horribly cruel to his biological son, whom he hasn't seen for 12 years. He's equally cruel to a nightclub singer who apparently loves him, although he forces his way into her car, insists on driving her home when he's falling-down drunk, and tries to seduce her mother. (At least that's what I think he was trying to do--the screenplay was muddled and I was losing interest by then.)I actually think that director Cassavetes has a real fondness for the person being portrayed by actor Casavetes. I guess that if you share that fondness, you'll like the film. I didn't share it, and I didn't like it.Note: Medical howler: At one point, young Dr. Williams examines Sarah and says, "Her pupils aren't reacting properly, and she has a stiff neck. She needs medical attention." Harmon says something like, "You have to leave now doctor. I'll take care of my sister." Dr. Williams is describing signs of serious intracranial pathology. Those are not signs that will disappear with a warm hug and some brandy. We're talking life-threatening stroke or meningitis. Bad scene, but pretty much par for this film.

jpschapira Firstly, it's not easy to have the full understanding of the cinematographic universe that John Cassavetes has. To take a stage play by Ted Allan and to co-write a script and create something that looks like everything but something you can imagine on a theater stage. In "Opening Night", almost everything occurred on the stage; here we have cities, we have bars, we have houses and, of course, people…Real people.I don't know if it makes any good to write long reviews about every Cassavetes' film. He pursued a style, he conquered it and he maintained it while dealing with different topics. "Love Streams" is the story of two brothers, Robert and Sarah (Cassavetes and his eternal muse Gena Rowlands), and some days they spend together. Like in the best movies, there's room for the viewer to draw conclusions. When Sarah knocks at Robert's door, it appears that they haven't seen each other for a long time; but we don't really know. When Robert receives his son (Jakob Shaw), the house is full of women and it appears that he doesn't care about the kid, but we don't really know; we also never fully understand the nature of Robert's work as a writer, meaning that we know he writes novels but the house full of women and the process he uses to create remains widely unexplained. When Robert interviews a singer he thinks is beautiful, it appears that he cares about her, but we don't really know. All these situations are not as simple as they sound; they're constant subjects in the film's two and half hours duration time. The same happens with the Rowlands character; a woman who loves his family but seems to be loosing them. There's a scene in which Sarah, her daughter Debbie (Risa Blewitt) and her husband Jack (Seymour Cassel) sit together to review the divorce papers and suddenly the little girl stands up and tells her mother: "I want to go with daddy".Sarah reacts as an unstable woman would do, and there are many moments in the film where we see this characteristic (we even witness a short but honest visit to a psychiatrist). However, her problem is not completely detailed and we have to figure it out through the same process we use to study Robert and every other character.This is what Cassavetes does. He puts the viewer to work. He presents the characters, he lets us know what we could normally see with a camera (Al Ruban's beautiful and observing camera, in a very similar style to "Opening Night"): the outside. The rest? Well, it's real life and people deal with it as it comes.In "Love Streams" you also have to deal with it. Deal with the things the characters are dealing with. It's not like you've never been involved with a movie character.

drosse67 I've seen five of Cassavetes' films, and for all of them, there is a long adjustment time. His filmmaking is so unique that it's initially off-putting. But if you stay with his films, you will soon find yourself engrossed. I wonder if that is one of the reasons most of his movies were so long--to allow for the audience to adjust. In this film, he introduces us to two extremely damaged individuals and we don't realize until the second hour that they are brother and sister. You get a real feel for the "home movie" method writer/director/star Cassavetes employed and the house in this movie looks exactly like the house from A Woman Under the Influence, so was this actually their house??? It is just as messy and oddly decorated, as if it had not been picked up in nearly ten years. This movie doesn't seem to have much of a plot, although it plays like an interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. I wonder if this was Cassevetes' intent as he appeared in a modern version of The Tempest (directed by Paul Mazursky) two years before this movie came out. This film could have been a real endurance test as some scenes go on forever. But anyone interested in seeing what has been called Cassevetes' most personal film, and a late career example of his style, should see this. It plays like a swan song to him as he died a few years after he made this. He seemed to have a fondness for serving alcohol to little kids, as this is the third movie I've seen of his where this happens. I haven't mentioned Gena Rowlands--she's just as good here as she was in Faces or Woman Under the Influence. She plays her sick character so well that you really believe that she could bring home all of those barnyard animals. I would not recommend this to anyone looking for entertainment but if you want to see something you surely will not forget anytime soon, then watch this.