Shadows, the latest entry in the Siskel Center's Great Transition series, is one of the few Cassavetes movies to attract broad critical acclaim. Straddling Italian neo-realism and the burgeoning French new wave, the urban race parable was shot on a change-purse budget without a script, and performed largely by non-actors. Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas famously dubbed it one of the "most modern and most intelligent American films" he had seen to date. From early Scorsese to Jarmusch and beyond, Shadows cast a huge you-know-what over nearly all American independent films that followed.