Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

chaos-rampant The film is grounded in a sort of vocabulary that was new at the time, in fact I think the influence of this is much more important than Breathless. You can tell now that it's scripted to be that way, that it's overdramatic in spots, and perhaps a bit long in the tooth. But for the time, it must have felt as intended, something wholly new and natural, a breath drawn for the first time. The main threads are not unusual, relationships, music, getting somewhere in life, but that's because in retrospect the casualness is familiar. It wasn't always there in American film. It would seem new when Woody Allen would do it a decade later. Heck, it would seem new when Tarantino would do it three decades later.The film points at the new morals, the life you wouldn't see in a Louis Mayer confection; a girl sleeps with a guy on the first date, whites and blacks hang together, fight and make-up, a girl dates a black guy, she is bossy and 'masculine', an exotic dancer turns out to be pregnant and happily married. Stereotypes are turned, for the first time that I know of so openly. That's fine.But what's really cool about it is that we don't just have life a certain way, but life wondering about what it means to be in the film.It's self-reference, but not Godard's schematic sort of exposing the camera and actors. Here it is completely merged with the flow of life. The talk between the jazz musicians about how to spice the 'act', how the audience loves jokes while joking about it to us. The girl who's written a story to be honest, purely felt, and her author friend who wants to sleep with her telling her about motivation. The beatnik guy who rants against 'teachers' who won't show life itself.There is no broader story. It's all by turns jazz riffing and making room that points at itself taking shape. There is some life, with dramatic ascends, with wonderful visual phrases. It's about all this having a presence, one as ubiquitous and mysteriously reflected on everything as the lights on the marquees and the strange man who pulls on the girl in that eerie, wonderful scene in the movie theater. This one scene right here, a few seconds, is the new language of cinema that is now saturating through Malick, more fully undertaken at the time in Hiroshima mon amour.And it's wholly 'now', what the beats knew as Zen at the time through Watts and others; the dharma wheel seen in the hot dog vendor's cart on the street.

MovieGuy109 John Cassavetes' first film is a wonder, a beautiful work of improvisation that ranks among the best of the 50's. No film to this day has done improvisation with such mastery and few films to this day have so many beautiful shots of New York. It is just as good as The New Wave films in France with characters that make sense. It's honest about its time period and really shows New York for what it is. This may be Cassavetes' best film or at least his most technically dazzling. The actors all seem at ease and natural which is the beauty of improv. and the beauty of Cassavetes' unique form of art. A low-key but worthwhile film.

zolaaar Shadows breathes the smell of New York's streets like no film before it. This kick off of Cassavetes' directorial work is as atmospheric as political and the initial spark for a renewal in American cinema.Maybe it solicits for watching Cassavetes' first work in a double feature with another debut, Godard's À bout de soufflé. Both films shaped the cinematic production of their countries beyond decades and both breathe a peculiar lightness and jauntiness which was later rarely achieved by those filmmakers in their career.Shadows tells from three Afro-American siblings, Ben (Ben Carruthers), Lelia (Lelia Goldoni) and Hugh (Hugh Hurd). The story is set in the New York jazz milieu and the driving rhythms on the soundtrack play a main part for the feverish, sometimes almost dreamlike atmosphere which draws through the entire film. There's not much happening in the plot. The everyday life of the three siblings is defined by problems in love relationship or in their jobs, but on both levels normality deceives. Without moralizing gestus, Cassavetes simply describes the mechanism of racial exclusion, in public and in private life. It was, regarding to the cinematic depiction of racism, a breakthrough film in the US. This film owes also a lot to the performances of the three leading actors which were all almost completely unknown before. Especially Ben Carruthers established with his energetic portrayal the image of a new self-conception of young, urban blacks in America, an image which characterizes Spike Lee's films of the 80s and 90s. Revealingly, none of those three doubtlessly extremely talented actors was able to start a big career afterwards. Hollywood wasn't and isn't ready to ethnically expand its star system, and that is why Goldoni, Hurd and Carruthers only found small artistic niches in TV and independent films later on.Perhaps Shadows is one of the less "beautiful" films ever shot, and one of the most beautiful ones at the same time; a film of shades and spaces, with a camera that merely watches the stream of life in the crowded street corners, bars, hotel lobbies, apartments, inducing an intriguing ramble through New York's vibrant streets.

jpschapira In the end credits of "Shadows", after we read 'directed by John Cassavetes', some white letters on the screen can be seen: "The film you have just seen is improvised", they say. I am always pursuing the fact that words are so important in movies since filmmakers started using them because, basically, there's no film without a screenplay and many other reasons.Cassavetes pursued the same goal, and he believed in the freedom of words; "Shadows" is the perfect example. It's a film with no real main characters, with no real main plot lines; it's mostly people in different situations, talking. Yes, some of the situations are connected but Cassavetes, apparently always in a rush to get to the talking, uses a fast forward technique when the characters are going somewhere or escaping from someone and are not speaking.Appearances are everything in this movie. For example, there's a brilliant score, full of jazz influences and a lot of fantastic solos, and there's one character that says he's a jazz musician and plays the trumpet (Ben, all the characters' names are the same names the actors'). However, we never see him play the trumpet or jam with a band; he doesn't even talk about music and just wanders with his friends around the city. They do talk, a lot, and about anything that's in their minds; going from how intelligent each of them are to the hilarious analysis of a sculpture."Shadows" is funny in its intellectual references in parts like the one above, because these friends are not cultured. The only important female character in the film (Lelia), though, wants to be an intellectual. But again, she has one very interesting conversation with an older man at a party, about a book she's trying to write, and about how to confront reality; but nothing to do with being intellectual. At that same party, a woman is actually making an intellectual statement, full of complexity, and asks a guy beside her: "Do you agree?". "Yes", he says, but you can tell he doesn't know what she's talking about.Another character, a singer (Hugh), talks about his glory days in occasions, and we see him perform only once; but no references to the musical industry there. The focus of Cassavetes is the singer's relationship with his manager (Rupert), which most of the time involves chats about trivial stuff and not real 'musical' talks. So the trumpet player's important deal in "Shadows" is the time he spends with his friends; the intellectual wannabe girl's is her way of handling romantic relationships (one of the movie's strong points) and the singer's is the bond with his manager…Appearances.The reason why performances are not important in this movie is simple. Cassavetes needed people who could master improvisation, without mattering if they were actually good. I believe some of them aren't, but they surely know how to improvise in a scene, and you can notice how well they do it. "Shadows" is not about performers; it's about a way of making cinema, based on the magic of conversation; and there you could say that performances mean something.That's why in every conversation the camera is like a stalker, constantly on the eyes of every character, constantly looking for the expressions that come with natural speech. There's a scene where the trumpet player and his friends are trying to pick up some girls. They are three, so each of them sits beside one girl (the girls are three two) in three different tables. They all talk at the same time and the camera shoots through the table, and sometimes the friends look at each other, while they say whatever they are saying…It's natural.