- 1959
- PG
- Lion International Films
- 1 h 21 m
SummaryCassavetes' jazz-scored improvisational film explores interracial friendships and relationships in Beat-Era (1950s) New York City.
Directed By:John Cassavetes
Written By:Robert Alan Aurthur, John Cassavetes
Shadows
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
86
User score
Generally Favorable
7.2
My Score
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Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
86
100% Positive
11 Reviews
11 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
100
The film perfectly captured a specific time and place, illuminating simple truths regarding the human condition, while unveiling an important, powerful, and visionary new force in the American cinema.
By Staff (Not Credited)
FULL REVIEW 90
Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.
88
Goldoni is spectacular here as a light-skinned black woman with a white admirer and an apartment full of her brother's hooligan buddies. And, oh, what shots of the era's New York movie marquees. [22 May 1998, p.6E]
80
It's a cool customer – the hip lingo and fast-talking characters all of a piece with its bebop score – but there's a scrupulous honesty to the story, too.
80
Caught in the ecstasy of collective creation, a handful of earnest amateurs have almost accidentally produced a flawed but significant piece of folk art.
By Staff (Not Credited)
FULL REVIEW 80
Shadows is an unfinished picture in every sense of the word. Yet it is fitfully dynamic, endowed with a raw but vibrant strength, conveying an illusion of being a record of real people, and it is incontestably sincere.
75
At 80 minutes, its cinematic flash fiction, and a suitable entry point into the lively body of work Cassavetes made.
User score
Generally Favorable
7.2
44% Positive
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
44% Mixed
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
11% Negative
1 Rating
1 Rating
Jun 21, 2020
10
John Cassavettes gets more interesting to me as time goes. This story of a mixed race couple where the man finds out after dating that his girlfriend is half black. At the time this was shocking, but to me the shocking thing is how she flaunts gender expectations. She makes out with a stranger in front of her boyfriend to show that she belongs to no one. She cannot escape being property, whether with a boyfriend, or in her own mind.
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