Love Streams
High Hopes
John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh are both regarded for their collaborative process in which actors help shape their respective characters. Begun when Cassavetes was quite ill, Love Streams represents a fond farewell to the director’s art. An idiosyncratic interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the film is a richly self-reflective work that revisits scenes, characters, and events from his previous films in a cinematic meditation on the meaning of a life lived in art. High Hopes presents a ground-level romp through Thatcher’s Britain as witnessed by the residents of a King’s Cross neighborhood in the throes of gentrification. At the center are a leftist thirty-something motorcycle messenger and his longtime companion who confront their qualms about the world which have kept them from starting a family.