I'm not a huge fan of slick Hollywood phoniness, but this film made me long for "Hollywood values". At least the boys and girls of Tinseltown know how to tell a story. If you are going to tell a story about a cultured, upper-middle-class woman falling for a not-too-bright, ill-mannered jerk of at best average appearance, you need to develop the characters, their motives, and the dynamics of their inherently implausible relationship convincingly. What this film needs is a lot more preliminary development of Minnie's character and a good deal less of the repetitious, one-note, top-of-the-lungs interaction between her and Moskowitz. It needs, in short, a better script and better direction. Cassavetes may have been a luminary of US independent cinema, but on this evidence at least his importance is strictly historical.
Review of Minnie and Moskowitz
