Love Streams

John Cassavetes portrays disillusioned writer Robert Harmon, and Gena Rowlands is his sister, Sarah, in this film about the blows and buttresses of family. Based on a play by Cassavetes’s close friend Ted Allan, the film works the brother-sister relationship as one Janus-faced character: Robert, who runs away from any children he may have fathered in order to continue being a child himself; and Sarah, perpetually maternal and insistently happy, who believes that everyone needs something—anything—to love. For the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, “The movie is a mighty, intimate, kaleidoscopically subjective, bravely self-searching summation of a career, an era, and a life.”