John Cassavetes
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I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
influenced by A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Themes
Consider her monologue on the drive home, where an unexpected reference to "A Woman Under the Influence" results in Louisa reciting Pauline Kael's critical review of the film and Gena Rowland's celebrated performance.
In the second half of the film, on the interminable trip back from his parents’ house, Jake says that he likes John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence , which the young woman essentially characterizes as a fake-feminist work of masochism, claiming that Gena Rowlands gives an exhausting tour de force, and that “nothing she does is memorable because she does so much.”
A discussion of Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence devolves into Buckley slipping invisibly into a recitation of Pauline Kael’s negative review of the film .
The Young Woman and Jake talk endlessly about Wordsworth’s poetry or John Cassavetes 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence (Buckley not only mimics Gena Rowland’s performance, she recites famed critic Pauline Kael’s dismissive review).
The two engage in epic conversations, touching on everything from William Wordsworth to the aforementioned Kael’s review of the 1974 John Cassavetes movie, “A Woman Under the Influence,” which Lucy recites from memory (it seems).
In another scene, the pair debate the quality of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, a clear spiritual cousin to I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
The film pays loving tribute to actresses and that genre of movies familiarly called "women's films" and Almodovar has merged three -- Bette Davis in "All About Eve," Gena Rowlands in "Opening Night" and Romy Schneider in "L'important c'est d'aimer" -- into a buoyant homage to the female sex, "women who act" and "actresses who have played actresses."
Yet despite those antecedents (and others, like Cassavetes' "Opening Night"), this film is pure Almod¢var.
I guess it represents a significant advance in his career, giving us a kinder, gentler, more soulful Almodovar who makes a lot more references than usual to other movies: All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire especially, but also (in terms of the story's point of departure) John Cassavetes's Opening Night.
Die My Love (2025)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
influenced by A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Themes Characters
In that sense, Ramsay’s latest has more in common with A Woman Under the Influence, the John Cassavetes film where Gena Rowlands’ seemingly wild character that lashes out at an ordinary society that expects the impossible of her – all while treating her interiority as an afterthought.
…her unraveling more akin to Gena Rowlands' in John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence."
Grace’s mental breakdown recalls such titanic works of empathetic cinema as John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence…
Mostly these places are addresses in New York City and Baumbach films in black-and-white to not just evoke Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), but also the early work of pioneering American independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, especially the New York set Shadows (1959).
Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
influenced by A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Plot
Kechiche signals his aspirations toward the epic by borrowing Lawrence of Arabia's bifurcated structure and throws in a spaghetti-dinner homage to Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence to tip off just how far we're going to fall.
Blue Valentine (2010)
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
influenced by Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Visuals
In the 60s and 70s John Cassavetes worked in this kind of territory, in pictures like Faces, A Woman Under the Influence and Husbands.
Taking a page, or maybe a full novella, from John Cassavetes' kitchen-sink melodramas, Blue Valentine amplifies the intensity a notch or two above the expected; it leaves the actors looking bruised and exhausted, like Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands at the end of Cassavetes' A Woman Under The Influence.
Naturally for a film this steeped in its own construction, there are oodles of film references, from Lars von Trier's "Europa" to "Harold and Maude" to, most bizarrely, "A Woman Under the Influence," in a squirm-inducing scene in which Polley's depressed housewife joins their daughter's birthday party and proceeds to make herself into an embarrassing dancing child.
It's not John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959), but what Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994), lacks in subtlety it makes up for in laughs.
Take Shelter (2011)
Directed by Jeff Nichols
influenced by A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Themes
It is one of the most captivating and overwhelming portrayals of mental illness in a domestic setting since John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in 1974.
Queen of Earth (2015)
Directed by Alex Ross Perry
influenced by A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Themes
Primed for madness under the thumb of her father, who obviously had been wrestling with depression, Catherine goes into "Repulsion" meets "Black Swan" meets "A Woman Under the Influence"-style crazy town, and if you're going to do this kind of movie, you have to deliver the paranoid, hallucinatory freakout scene.
The obvious antecedent for Queen of Earth is John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, but Perry draws more extensively from what seems like an entire subgenre of two-handed women-in-crisis dramas, the most pointed of which come directly from the era between the ’60s and the ’70s that he cites as the most influential to his work. 1 Shot on 16mm and announced through stylised titles in bold red cursive (designed by Teddy Blanks, who also designed the memorable book covers of Listen Up Philip, glimpsed here in Ginny’s grasps and stocking her bookshelves), Queen of Earth is conscious of what informs its narrative and aesthetic, whilst never leaning on kitsch or lazy imitation.
Criminals teamed with kids is nothing new: John Cassavetes' Gloria tackled the subject 20 years ago for laughs.
Though there are plot similarities here to John Cassavetes' 1980 "Gloria" (where gun moll Gena Rowlands aided a kid on the run), "The Professional" doesn't really make sense as a thriller.
Essentially, I've seen The Professional a few times before; its closest antecedent is John Cassavetes' Gloria, from 1980, about a little boy who runs afoul of gangsters and is protected by a tough female detective.
His father was the late John Cassavetes, who for years financed his own deeply personal and naturalistic films (Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, Gloria), often co-starring wife Rowlands.
The Bride! (2026)
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
influenced by A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Characters
Her histrionics pay tribute to the current feminist idolization of Gena Rowland’s gyrations as a schizophrenic in A Woman Under the Influence…
…it feels right for this particular character to be at war with herself and to be a personality trifle of Beatrice from “Much Ado About Nothing,” Mabel from “A Woman Under the Influence,” and Mae West.
Licorice Pizza (2021)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Themes
He doesn’t want to weaponize his nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake so much as use it to infuse a rush of youthful exuberance into what feels like an early-1970s movie made today — a Minnie and Moskowitz for millennials.
It’s a good premise, with plenty of inherent tension, but Tarantino drags the scene on forever; the drinking game played here is about as interminable as the notorious drunken song scene in John Cassavetes’ “Husbands,” and equally self-indulgent.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
influenced by Opening Night (1977)
Plot
It’s worth comparing it to another movie about actors in a troubled stage production as it speeds toward opening night—namely, John Cassavetes’s “ Opening Night .”
Quentin Tarantino came out of nowhere with perhaps the most astonishing, explosive American debut film since John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959), even if it only played to small, enthusiastic crowds in art houses.
The Fabelmans (2022)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced by A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Characters
Following her whims and enthusiasms greedily, she’s just off-kilter enough to occasionally call to mind Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence .
Uncut Gems (2019)
Directed by Josh Safdie
influenced by The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Gloria (1980)
Visuals Characters
It all plays out like a hyperactive cross between a hard-boiled John Cassavetes melodrama like Gloria or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and a character-driven Sidney Lumet thriller like Q&A or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead .
In Howard’s doomed figure is something of Ben Gazzara’s character from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie , a social climber who keeps slipping on the bottom rungs and whose individual tragedy illuminates the emptiness of the systems that define him.
It all plays out like a hyperactive cross between a hard-boiled John Cassavetes melodrama like Gloria or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and a character-driven Sidney Lumet thriller like Q&A or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead .
Everything from Look Back and The Fabelmans, to Singin’ in the Rain, The Hero, and Opening Night.