Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Adam Friedland 5

  I want to be with my boys forever

• 

  Review by cuckoochanel ★★★★½ 19

  Husbands is a survey of the male midlife crisis as depicted by three friends who abandon home, country,
  responsibility, civility, and sanity when confronted with their own mortalities in the wake of a beloved friend’s death.

  It cannot be overstated how alienating this experience was for me, a woman. Seeing John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk traipse about New York City and London in madcap fashion on the hunt for booze and cooze wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar antic in the tropes of film (or in the lives of ordinary people), but it was the potency of their iniquities that induced in me at turns woeful embarrassment, anxious alarm, putrid disgust, rankled confusion, tearful shame, and vacant hollowness. They show…

• 

  Review by Robert Franco ★★★★★

  anyone else miss having friends?

• 

  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★ 1

  totally nails the agony of when all you want to do is throw up and your friend won't stop talking

• 

  Review by KYK ★★★★ 3

  i think about what Cassavetes said about Love Streams more in relation to Husbands: that it was "so psychologically dangerous, lonely, terrifying and so uncommercial" that they "pretended [they] had a comedy."

  indeed, as the tagline says: "a comedy about life, death, and freedom."

• 

  Review by laura ★★★½

  i was going to ask if it’s possible to both be in love with & hate a group of men but then i realized that’s pretty much my daily experience with men

• 

  Review by Muriel ★★★★★ 2

  so incredibly real and painful like everything else i've seen from cassavetes. it's definitely called husbands because the three of them are married to each other.

• 

  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 10

  "Well I'm not going home; I'm going to get very drunk."

  Methinks the title for John Cassavetes' fifth feature Husbands might be a little ironic. The private world of three married professional men (played by Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes) is suddenly destabilized by the death of a fourth friend, intimated to be the linchpin of their tight social circle. The remaining trio appear deeply stung by the superficial vacuity of the funeral service, though one may reasonably assume that their collective pique actually has more to do with the precipitous intrusion of mortality upon the psyches of these trim, middle-class suburbanites. Enmeshed between unprocessed grief and unexamined codes of atavistic masculinity, the bereaved husbands impulsively decide that a…

• 

  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  Pseudo humanist cinephilia loves to misreads the famous The Rules of the Game quote about everybody having their reasons, but it is Cassavetes ouvre that perfect illustrates it without no distance, just a matter that his camera remain closer and understanding no matter what or who its filming. Husbands is one of the most generous of all movies right there from having the credits in two democratic cards that include the name of everyone who worked on it. "A comedy about love, death and freedom" the secondary title announces. very fairly; It is pretty funny, very desperate rage again the passing of time. men acting childish and bullysh without Cassavetes camera never taking any distance. We just remain there close to them and their personal abyss.

• 

  Review by Dante Izrael ★★★★ 1

  Feels less like a film and more like a sociological examination of male relationships - the relationships men have with women, the relationships men have with each other, and the relationships that men have with themself. These men are fundamentally unable to sincerely communicate grief to each other, unable to sincerely communicate their guilt and sadness, they can barely understand the world around them - not even their wives and families - because of how deeply they understand each other. They’ve created their own language of communicating with each other - through joking, through drinking, through aggression - but rarely if ever through genuine expression.

  The scenes in the hotel room, in which each of the men is paired off…

• 

  Review by Sarah ★★★½ 2

  love when men hate themselves

• 

  Review by Jake Cole ★★★½

  The hardest Cassavetes movie I've seen, not necessarily in its human revelations than in the sheer discomfort of being around its drunken, belligerent, insecure male trio. Cassavetes pre-production improv has never exerted such a complete influence on the final, crafted work, with numerous scenes that seem to run stagnant from sheer bloat where elsewhere his long scenes of naked acting and structured abstract are compelling for how they open up people. Nonetheless, what gets communicated is so nasty and unsparing in its view of masculine angst and midlife crises that my attention didn't wander too often. I'll need to revisit this down the road.