Why do the professors feel that they have to turn everything into academic gobbledygook? This book takes a filmmaker who was known for his freedom from intellectual abstractions and critical cliches and turns him into a practitioner of the latest French-fried intellectual practices. You can't find Cassavetes here for the cant. His work is lost and unrecognizable, buried under the layers of continental critical jargon. If you are really interested in learning abouto Cassavete, skip Kouvaros and read the filmmaker's own descriptions of his films and his accounts of making them in Cassavetes on Cassavetes or in Ray Carney's books. Carney's books read like eating ice cream. This is like trying to chew and swallow ground glass. Too bad. Cassavetes deserves much better. He would have been howling with laughter at what has been done to him.

I am the author of Cassavetes on Cassavetes... and of the pack-in essay that is included in this DVD, and I want to agree with Martin Doudoroff's review that is somewhere below mine. This film is one of the supreme masterworks of all of American cinema. It is absolutely essential. Yes, it is "difficult." Yes, it is "slow." But those standards are for enterainment. Cassavetes wants to take us out of our ordinary ways of viewing. He wants to deny us the escapism of "entertainment." That's the point. If you have trouble with this film--good! If you find it infuriating--good! If you find it not entertaining--good! It wants to get under your skin. It wants to shake you up.

It is a deep exploration of manhood in America, of the power games that men play with women, and of the other kinds of games women victimize themselves with. Deeper than Citizen Kane, more abrasive than Magnolia or American Beauty, Faces turns the camera on US. It is not about someone else. It does want to annoy you. And if you allow it to, without giving up or shutting your mind to it, it will profoundly enlighten you.

I can't say more in the space available. Maybe the Cassavetes on Cassavetes book or my web site devoted to Cassavetes can throw more light on the subject. But trust me, this film can change your life. It is one of the greatest works of art in all of film. And the resistance it meets with is proof of that.

Note who has contributed the other reviews: politicians, journalists, hack writers. Lee Cullum offers glib, shallow, journalistic analysis. Every cliche you tune out when it appears on The Evening News or Charlie Rose is trooped out here. A litmus test of what the middlebrow thinks. Or rather what passes for thought with such a middlebrow. It's really a truimph of recycling. Cullum makes noises about the decline of civilization with the rise of postmodernism, and then fulfills her own prediction. Only in our era can the journalist actually pass for a thinker--with other journalists that is, who will make sure this book gets a royal sendoff. Change the channel.