LOVE STREAMS Cinema's Legacy

Love – flawed, messy and wounded – streams through this latter-era film by the great John Cassavetes. Centering on a boozy, hedonistic writer and his beleaguered sister (played, respectively, by Cassavetes and the equally great Gena Rowlands, his real-life wife and collaborator), the film is a portrait of two fragile souls who, for better or worse, must find emotional shelter with one another as they navigate the short- and long-term fallouts of divorce. Though Cassavetes would make one more film before his death at age 59 in 1989, LOVE STREAMS is his last distinctively personal work, and an important addition to his oeuvre of sensitive yet unsparing, to-the-bone films about human relationships. It celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and will screen on a 35mm print.