The curse of filmmaking, as John Cassavetes shows us [in A Woman under the Influence], is that it's too easy. No, of course not the financing and so on, but the basic process of making a film….

Cassavetes is enraptured. He puts his camera in real houses and he gives his actors things to say as lifelike as he can make them and he even puts some non-actors in the cast and he lets the camera run and run, lets the people improvise on their lines, and the camera keeps running and running and the people keep on doing and saying and quarreling and crying and making up, and after it's all done he takes the film out of the camera and shows it to us. For goodness' sake, there it is. What more can we want?…

This sentimentality about method is, unsurprisingly, joined to sentimentality about subject...