A film that seems to always exist at some indeterminate halfway point, shifting around as much as its camera does, saturated with unreadable faces and incandescent colors, moments of spontaneous romance given immediate awareness through musical cues and background posters, somewhat distancing but not enough to deny the integrity of what we're seeing.

When we're first introduced to Dr. Nancy Love, or Ann or whatever her name actually is, the camera stays behind the glass barrier, rendering visible the mediation…

Equal parts torturous and liberating. The whiplash editing of the film's opening moments tells us everything we need to know. Cassavetes fragments continuity and spatial coherence as a means of creating ontological uncertainty, collapsing all meaningful distinctions between performance, spectatorship and so-called real life. The way he toggles so aggressively between massive wides and extreme close-ups and the way he smash cuts to new scenes made me feel like I was being dragged around by my hair.

Like many of…