NOT-SO-SMILEY FACES

John Cassavetes’ Faces is certainly a movie to shout about . . . and maybe sing and laugh and cry and bray and tell bad jokes about, too. In a new article titled “Essential Cassavetes,” Slate film critic Dana Stevens calls the American independent trailblazer’s jarring portrait of a disintegrating marriage—available now as a stand-alone Criterion double-DVD release—“one of the greatest American films of the 1960s.” Though Faces features its miserable suburban couple engaged in a whole lot of bad behavior, Stevens argues that “Cassavetes films his characters with such deep compassion that even the crudest sally comes off as a gesture of love, a misguided bid for recognition.”

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