If The Roost was Ti West kicking down the basement door to horror with a bucket of bats and a prayer, then The House of the Devil is him lighting candles, putting on a Walkman, and methodically dragging you into the black velvet wallpapered living room of the damned. And unlike most horror filmmakers playing … Read More ““The House of the Devil” (2009): Babysitter Wanted, Satanic Cult Included” »
The Roost is what happens when a film student finds a fog machine at a garage sale, watches Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the same weekend, and then decides to shoot a horror movie with five friends, three bats, and a gallon of expired red corn syrup. Ti … Read More ““The Roost” (2005): Or, How to Waste Bats, Blood, and 80 Minutes of Your Life” »
You ever walk into an art gallery and wonder if the janitor just left a pile of garbage in the middle of the floor? That’s Showing Up, the cinematic version of someone dumping papier-mâché sadness on your shoe and then asking you to contemplate its existential weight. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, this is yet another … Read More ““Showing Up” (2022) – A Slow-Burn Art-School Nightmare Where Nothing Happens and Everyone’s Wearing Crocs” »
Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women is less a film and more a series of emotional stalemates dressed in earth tones. It’s three loosely connected stories about women drifting through wintry Montana landscapes with the energy of someone who just drank chamomile tea and remembered they have jury duty. There’s no climax, no payoff, and no pulse—just … Read More ““Certain Women” (2016) – Where Emotion Goes to Die in Beige Cardigans” »
There’s a special kind of masochism involved in watching Meek’s Cutoff. It’s a film that starts with the promise of manifest destiny and ends with the unmistakable whimper of manifest disinterest. Director Kelly Reichardt, ever the connoisseur of existential inertia, takes the American West—land of danger, discovery, and dysentery—and turns it into an arid meditation … Read More ““Meek’s Cutoff” (2010) – The Oregon Trail, Minus the Dysentery, Plus a Lot of Staring” »
Welcome to the slowest hike in cinematic history. Old Joy is Kelly Reichardt’s idea of a profound emotional journey—except instead of catharsis, you get two bearded guys mumbling about nothing while trudging through Oregon moss. Think Deliverance without banjos, drama, or, you know, deliverance. This is a film so still, so meditative, so aggressively underacted, … Read More ““Old Joy” (2006) – A Movie About Two Men, a Forest, and Nothing Happening for 76 Straight Minutes” »
Imagine Bonnie and Clyde if they hated excitement, avoided sex, and their version of rebellion was loitering in parking lots and whispering their dreams into a broken ceiling fan. That’s River of Grass, Kelly Reichardt’s first feature-length offering—a mumblecore crime story where the real heist is your time and the getaway car stalls 10 feet … Read More ““River of Grass” (1994) – Crime, Ennui, and the Murky Waters of Indie Pretension” »
If you’ve ever found yourself watching a Terrence Malick movie and thinking, “This would be better if it had fewer dinosaurs and more pastry theft,” congratulations — Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is your reward. And by reward, I mean punishment. A film so slow, so oppressively quiet, it feels less like a story and more … Read More ““First Cow” (2019): Moo-Ving at the Speed of Death” »
If you’ve ever wanted to watch eco-terrorists plan a bomb plot with all the enthusiasm of ordering gluten-free toast, Night Moves is your dream come true. This is Kelly Reichardt’s idea of a thriller — a slow-burn so slow it doesn’t just burn, it sulks. It’s a movie where the most explosive thing isn’t the … Read More ““Night Moves” (2013) — Eco-Terrorism, but Make It Boring” »
There’s minimalist cinema, and then there’s Wendy and Lucy — a film so stripped down, so devoid of anything resembling story, it might as well have been written on a napkin during a panic attack in Portland. Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 ode to aimlessness features Michelle Williams as a perpetually frowning woman, a lost dog, and … Read More ““Wendy and Lucy” (2008) — A Meditation on Misery with a Dog and a Glare” »
