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Poster for Opening Night

Opening Night

The Show Must Go On…

1977 · 2h 24m · PG-13 Drama
Directed by John Cassavetes

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Overview

Actress Myrtle Gordon is a functioning alcoholic who is a few days from the opening night of her latest play, concerning a woman distraught about aging. One night a car kills one of Myrtle's fans who is chasing her limousine in an attempt to get the star's attention. Myrtle internalizes the accident and goes on a spiritual quest, but fails to finds the answers she is after. As opening night inches closer and closer, fragile Myrtle must find a way to make the show go on.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
92%
Tomatometer
Fresh

Gena Rowlands turns in another virtuoso performance as the troubled actress. Cassavetes' highly personal work will please his coterie of enthusiasts, but for general audiences it will be viewed as shrill, puzzling, depressing and overlong.

Variety Staff, Variety
Fresh

Juggling onstage and offstage action, Cassavetes makes this a fascinating look at some of the internal mechanisms and conflicts that create theatrical fiction.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Fresh

At once a lament to the ravages of age and an examination of those tiny foibles which separate reality from dramatic artifice, it's a baffling and intricate film which, although light on conventional pleasures, still manages to provoke and beguile.

David Jenkins, Time Out
Fresh

Rowlands sings a different kind of mad song in Opening Night, playing a diva-like actress preparing a part about aging that haunts her, at times literally, with a vision of lost youth.

Keith Phipps, AV Club
Fresh

The scenes in which Myrtle consults first one and then another spiritualist are typical of Cassavetes's genius in filming madness.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

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