Kelly Reichardt
45 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Though one could glimpse The Searchers (1956) in its lunar landscapes, or Days of Heaven (1978) in its detached mood and often eerie beauty, the film's small, inward-looking narrative and headily large themes make it a piece of considerable originality.
Meek’s Cutoff is most definitely a niche programmer – sparse and understated dialogue, the barest of mood music and a bleached, dusty palette brings to mind such revered but commercially-barren westerns as Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Robert Benton’s Bad Company (1972) and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
Notwithstanding exquisite images that evoke Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," city-slicker audiences may find themselves getting saddle sore.
Epic in scope, and featuring a powerful lead performance by Williams, Reichardt does justice to the myth of the wagon train settlers and makes a Western every bit as beautiful and poetic as Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, and thankfully a bit more energetic.
He captures the vast wilderness in condensed form and has a "Days of Heaven" kind of appreciation for the golden hues of the landscape.
Leave No Trace (2018)
Directed by Debra Granik
influenced by Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), Certain Women (2016)
Themes
It’s a story that might remind some of such films as Captain Fantastic and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both curiously starring Viggo Mortensen, or perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s small dramas set in the American Northwest (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy).
In films like Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt presents the region as a place where life is tough and the people persist in a quiet, gentle way.
Leave No Trace feels like it belongs to a school of Northwest neorealism I most closely associate with Kelly Reichardt, the Portland-based director whose film Wendy and Lucy was about the tragic mercy that strangers extend to one another when they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Though Granik’s approach is reminiscent of the sensitive, stripped-down style of Kelly Reichardt’s work (“Wendy and Lucy,” “Certain Women”), by reteaming with Scottish cinematographer Michael McDonough (who shot not only “Winter’s Bone,” but also Terence Davies’ radiant “Sunset Song” and the gritty prison drama “Starred Up”), she creates a richer visual environment in which to dwell.
It’s a story that might remind some of such films as Captain Fantastic and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both curiously starring Viggo Mortensen, or perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s small dramas set in the American Northwest (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy).
In films like Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt presents the region as a place where life is tough and the people persist in a quiet, gentle way.
What I do know is that Zhao, like Kelly Reichardt (whose Wendy and Lucy is spiritual kin to this film), has a knack for gazing on the deeds of marginalized people with the greatest delicacy and empathy, without turning preachy or polemical.
It’s a character in these films — like Kelly Reichardt does with her penetrating work; see First Cow , Old Joy , Wendy and Lucy .
Fear not: “Nomadland” is still a real movie, with powerful bursts of anger and sorrow as Fern grows frustrated by her limited options and comes mighty close to exploiting the generosity around her. Though the spirit of Terrence Malick is prominent in Zhao’s lyrical style, “Nomadland” also calls to mind Ken Loach’s kitchen-sink realism for its depiction of lower-class angst clattering against the ambivalence of capitalism (consider the plight of the protagonist of “I, Daniel Blake”), not to mention Kelly Reichert’s visions of wayfaring loners (imagine Michelle Williams’ wanderer from “Wendy and Lucy,” all grown up and still no place to go).
It’s a character in these films — like Kelly Reichardt does with her penetrating work; see First Cow , Old Joy , Wendy and Lucy .
This isn’t even the gritty desperation of “Heat.”
There’s been people comparing this film to Heat in terms of intensity compared to the rest of her minimalistic filmography…
Viewers accustomed to the knotty “Short Cuts” school of multiple short-story adaptation may take a while to acclimatize to the film’s patient, clean-edged structure, which opts neither for explicit chaptering nor for intricate braiding of the three stories in question.
It’s why comparisons with Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, which have come up in various reviews, don’t quite fit.
Imagine a version of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts that didn’t weave its individual tales into some ensemble tapestry, instead simply offering a few acute approximations of Raymond Carver’s voice.
For O’Connor, it’s a turn that resembles his sublime performance as tomb-raider Arthur in La Chimera…
…who brings some of the same qualities as his turn in La Chimera. Like Arthur from that film, J.B. is a scruffy art stealer with pensive looks…
O’Connor, playing a not-so-dissimilar character from his archaeologist-turned-graverobber in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera…
Josh O’Connor (Challengers, La Chimera)…
J.B Mooney (Josh O'Connor, "Challengers," "La Chimera")…
The second woman-directed film to compete in Cannes starring Josh O’Connor as a ratty and wayward art thief—take note that Alice Rohrwacher was immediately on-site at the film’s premiere to shower Reichardt with applause as soon as the lights came on…
This isn’t “Ocean’s Eleven” with its swagger and precisely choreographed cons.
…if you are expecting “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001), literally readjust to the opposite…
To go further, in addition to the black-and-white, which is more constraining and sinister than it is beautiful, Eggers has employed a narrow aspect ratio, closer to a square than a rectangle, similar to the shape used in Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, and David Lowery's A Ghost Story, and to movies made in the earliest days of cinema.
A party is held in the house, a man (Will Oldham, "Old Joy") philosophizing about humankind's quest for meaning in what we leave behind when we depart this earth and how we exist until we're lost to collective memory.
Good One (2024)
Directed by India Donaldson
influenced by Old Joy (2006), Meek's Cutoff (2011)
Themes Visuals
The film is a lot like the works of Kelly Reichardt—particularly her breakout feature Old Joy—in how characters guard their feelings and show tremors under the gentle, easygoing façade of the action.
Good One is like a little sister to Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, another fantastic film about the dynamics of two men’s friendship.
India Donaldson's minimalist, slow-burn feature debut reveals a sensibility that inevitably invites comparisons with the work of Kelly Reichardt, especially Old Joy.
Much of Good One plays like a cross between Kelly Reichardt and Noah Baumbach – with further crisscrossing between multiple modes of each filmmaker. There’s the modest, verdant-scenery male bonding of Reichardt’s Old Joy, plus the seething, stranded dynamic of Michelle Williams’ character in Meek’s Cutoff; similarly, the banter of a Baumbach comedy – the dialogue between Chris and Matt is often very funny – intersects with a lower-key version of Marriage Story tensions.
It’s been nearly two decades since Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy showed how the wilderness can be an open canvas to explore the breaking points of male friendship and reckoning with a midlife crisis. While those emotional quandaries are evergreen, it’s appropriate timing to bring an entirely new element to this conceit.
Much of Good One plays like a cross between Kelly Reichardt and Noah Baumbach – with further crisscrossing between multiple modes of each filmmaker. There’s the modest, verdant-scenery male bonding of Reichardt’s Old Joy, plus the seething, stranded dynamic of Michelle Williams’ character in Meek’s Cutoff; similarly, the banter of a Baumbach comedy – the dialogue between Chris and Matt is often very funny – intersects with a lower-key version of Marriage Story tensions.
The crew filmed in New Mexico, but no matter the U.S. state, the terrain looks and feels like the bleak Eastern Oregon desert in “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010).
With New Mexico filling in suitably for a pre-metroplex North Texas and the Hill Country before urban sprawl, it would be easy to imagine the Captain and Johanna crossing wagon trails with the pioneering women of Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, or sharing quiet communion with Ethan Hawke's PTSD-riddled gunslinger in Ti West's lamentably underseeen In a Valley of Violence.
Dexterously (and shown in close-ups a’la Pickpocket, a surprisingly apt reference for the film as a whole)…
Reichardt has specifically mentioned the films of Jean-Pierre Melville as an influence, and it's easy to see what she's getting at: I think of how something like Le Samouraï functions by creating a tension between the charismatic cool of Alain Delon and the fundamental hollowness of his character…
…the 1970 arthouse classic, The Conformist, came to mind…
…his 1974 film Lancelot du Lac is the best cure for insomnia I’ve ever found…
…something closer to the chilly judgment from the last chapter of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, used as the final line in the Kubrick adaptation of the novel: "good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now".
It is a crime film in the way Jarmusch’s Down by Law is a crime film, with its plodding, quizzical approach to law evasion and its sad sack of a protagonist, who spends most of the story just kind of… sulking around.
…and Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass…
It’s been on the rise in the United States for about decade, with films like Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop (2007) and Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) employing a natural and semi-observational style that focuses on characters and situations rather than heavy-handed plots to tell their stories about America’s downtrodden poor.
You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
influenced by Wendy and Lucy (2008)
Visuals
Fans of Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist gems, especially her comparable 2008 film Wendy and Lucy, will find a kindred spirit in writer/director Andrew Haigh.