"Gena Rowlands is a goddess. I almost don’t know what else to say beyond that. I love the scene when her character, an actress named Myrtle Gordon, shows up to the theater drunk beyond belief on opening night. The physicality of Rowlands’s performance is brilliant: the tension in her mouth, the heavy breathing, her limbs rigid one moment, limp the next. Watching her gain her composure is harrowing and hilarious at the same time."

"Put this one and A Woman Under the Influence side by side and you have ample proof of my theory that Gena Rowlands is the greatest American actor or actress ever. Period. No prosthetics, no extreme weight gain or loss, no accents or limps . . . and yet has any other actor ever created two more distinct, honest, or complete human beings on-screen? Rowlands somehow simply shifts her center of gravity and transforms from Woman’s selfless and fragile Mabel Longhetti into Opening Night’s cunning and self-obsessed Broadway star Myrtle Gordon. Ben Gazzara is her director, Manny Victor, and the scene where he shares an intimate midnight moment with his neglected wife (the great Zohra Lampert), only to be interrupted by his leading lady, is priceless."

"Gena Rowlands is a force of nature and John Cassavetes’s greatest muse. I saw this movie straight out of theater school and it shook me to the core. Her performance is electric. It was everything I love about acting: raw, dangerous, unpredictable, shocking, alive. You can’t keep your eyes off of her. It’s difficult to explain, but I didn’t know that films could do what Cassavetes does with this film. It was the film that made me see the potential that the medium could have. And it seriously made me want to be in one."

"My introduction to Cassvettes. It’s an opus. I liked it but I did not love it the first time I saw it. The movie takes patience but then you realize that’s the genius of it, the imitative way it puts the audience in a kind of narrative stupor. And once you’re there, it runs you through every emotion. So good luck with that. Also, Gena Rowlands is a goddess who walks among us. Of all the tributes to Cassavetes, this is surely the most minor but . . . my cat is named Mabel. Similar behavior."

"Between Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes. I still dream, to this day, of having an experience. I thought the borderline guys are the modern version of this, of creating a really intimate, truly intimate environment, without any kind of producers with creative control, or any kind of desire of a specific distribution, but to just make stories that you want to make because they are close to you and personal and interesting and character-driven. Gena Rowlands, to me, is so amazing to watch. That’s something I discovered more in my early 20s, Cassavetes movies.#"

"My favorite — my number one favorite, actually — is A Woman Under the Influence. [Gena Rowlands] is just… I respect and admire her so much as an actress. I just think that performance is so brave and extraordinary. It was one of those things that, as a woman, as an actress, I kind of appreciate, you know. And also, that film is kind of a really, truly independent film. I think Cassavetes financed it, I think Peter Falk put money into it; kind of no one really believed in it. I was in a film a couple of years ago that a studio would never touch, a movie called Trucker, which was a great opportunity for me; but those sort of movies need to be independently financed."

"I loved when Criterion started making these massive box sets, like this and the Rohmer Six Moral Tales. The idea of including a second edition of a film you already love (in this case, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; see also: Brazil) is genius and shows a complete mastery of the importance of supplements. I guess this is a fairly obvious and oft-cited pick, but oh, well. It’s incredible, and learning that the five films are included because they are the ones Cassavetes produced independently and that Gena Rowlands ended up owning the rights to was fascinating. Tricky rights issues can unfortunately cause masterworks to languish in undeserved obscurity, so the partnership that brought us this collection feels particularly monumental."

"I love Cassavetes and many of his films have had a great influence on me. He has made the most impressive female portraits, and Gena Rowlands, who was always so incredible, intimate, explosive, and vibrant, has been an inspiration. A Woman Under the Influence has one of the most incredible female performances in modern cinema; it feels so real that it hurts. She is so vulnerable, it feels like you’re watching someone’s actual existence. Everything seems so free and wild and organic. It’s like looking at a Fauvist painting—it looks easy and natural, but the amount of energy that’s in the film is something that’s hard to capture. Anyone who has been involved in filmmaking knows that it is almost impossible to get to those levels of truth."