[Husbands] serves up heavy dosage of humor and tragedy and an impressive honesty rarely captured in American movies. Cassavetes' scripting and direction are quite realistic and often brilliant.

Few films capture with such life-affirming wonder the despair, hatred, and incomprehension that drives the sexes together and apart.

Cassavetes was a masterful anti-Hollywood director who probed human failings until he reached right under the skin.

Realism, in the cinema of John Cassavetes, has an edge of madness, pain and neurosis. Cassavetes aestheticizes pain and anxiety to represent the truth of his reality.