Reading, Watching, Listening 7/4/2025

A few words about Kelly Reichardt movies

“Certain Women,” dir. Kelly Reichardt

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Today is a good day to watch a Kelly Reichardt film. It’s the Fourth of July, America’s birthday, and from what I can tell standing where I am on the other side of the border, it’s looking like a pretty shitty fucking birthday. So celebrating America, probably not a great idea right now. Maybe celebrate an American? And given this is mostly a film blog, I thought to myself, Is there a particular American filmmaker worth celebrating? Kelly Reichardt was the first name that popped into my mind.

There are, technically speaking, more important working American filmmakers. Scorsese and Spielberg, of course, and throw in Coppola (Francis Ford), why not. Christopher Nolan, despite his British accent, technically a dual-citizen raised partly in Chicago. He’s pretty important. There are others I could name—Soderbergh, Coppola (Sofia), the Brothers Coen, Malick, Anderson (Wes and PT), and on and on—who could be said to have bigger careers, more direct impact on the industry or the art, whose influence is more strongly felt in cinema and culture. But if you ask me who is the most important working American filmmaker, my gut response is Kelly Reichardt.

Many, maybe most of you reading this already know Reichardt and her work, but in case not… She released her first film, River of Grass, in 1994. A beautiful, Florida-set riff on Badlands. Her next film arrived in 2006. Old Joy, a stupendously well-observed film about male friendships and old connections. Since then, she’s made Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, Certain Women, First Cow, and Showing Up. These are all, in their way, films about America, about living in it, working in it, yearning in it, rebelling against it, building it, reforming it, observing it, and succumbing to it. Throw a dart in her filmography and you’ll hit a masterpiece. Reichardt’s eye is defined by a nostalgic softness that nonetheless pierces through the veneer of American conformity. Every character in her movies is a person, in full, expressing the variety present in the country’s makeup.

Old Joy is a great place to start. Wendy and Lucy is maybe the movie of hers most like a mission statement. For my money, though, Certain Women is the film to seek out. A tryptic of Maile Meloy stories that barely connect, all set in roughly the same town. It is about three women, each of them caught in the malaise of everyday life, though each in a totally different context. Their desires are defined by their circumstances and their will toward an escape. Laura Dern leads the first story, while Michelle Williams leads the second. Both of these are marvellous. Where the movie really comes together, though, is in its third story, led by a then unknown Lily Gladstone, a ranch hand who finds herself smitten by a night school teacher played by Kristen Stewart. It’s a story full of beautiful aching, and Gladstone’s performance is one of the best you’ll ever see in your life.

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Not much to promote this week, except for my most recent post, which celebrated Canada Day by recommending a bunch of Canadian movies I like. No fancy ranking, no particular theme, just a cross section of Canadian films that popped into my head as I sat down to write.

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Reading, Watching, Listening

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