Kelly Reichardt

One of the great American filmmakers in the 21st century, Kelly Reichardt has established a worldwide reputation as a major voice of personal filmmaking and storytelling that resists commercial trends, visualizing quiet tales of often struggling working-class women in the Pacific Northwest. Reichardt’s influence is so manifest that it is now impossible to imagine the work of a new generation of independent women filmmakers without her body of work.

This is all the more remarkable given that Reichardt made no features for twelve years between her first, River of Grass (1994), and her second, Old Joy (2006). Her latest film, Showing Up (2022), starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Maryann Plunkett, John Magaro, Judd Hirsch, and Amanda Plummer, premiered in competition at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival.  

After earning her MFA at the College of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Kelly Reichardt worked with filmmaker Todd Haynes on his acclaimed feature, Poison (1991) before embarking on her first feature, River of Grass, a darkly comedic tale set in the working class of Florida. It remains the only feature Reichardt has set in her home state and her only comedy.

While River of Grass received considerable critical acclaim, those anticipating her second film had to wait over a decade (a wait Reichardt directly blames on facing resistance as a woman filmmaker from funders and producers), and were startled by the radically different tone of Old Joy (2006), with Daniel London and Will Oldham, a masterful example of the then-new movement dubbed “slow cinema.”

The film set the tone, style, and, in some ways, the template for Reichardt’s films to come, blending sensitive character study, a deep interest in landscape and nature vs. the urbanized world, and a fascination for the way that changes that happen in people’s lives occur in small, incremental ways, not in huge, dramatic strokes.

With her masterpiece, Wendy and Lucy (2008), Kelly Reichardt definitively confirmed her place as a major artist in world cinema and began her extremely fruitful collaboration with actor Michelle Williams. Her portrait of a desperate working-class woman in quiet crisis has been compared with the finest films of French master Robert Bresson and the Italian neo-realist masters and also marked Reichardt’s first collaboration with author/novelist Jonathan Raymond.

Reichardt continued her work with Williams and Raymond two years later with the stark, unforgiving Western set on the Oregon Trail, Meek’s Cutoff (2010), with Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, and Shirley Henderson. Reichardt, with co-writer Raymond, played with elements of the thriller for the noir Night Moves (2013), with Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard, and was the second consecutive film to compete for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Kelly Reichardt made another striking shift within her filmmaking style with the superb Certain Women (2016), an elegant and sensitive adaptation of Maile Meloy’s story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, co-starring Williams, Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone. After putting on hold a planned film adapting Patrick deWitt’s novel, Undermajordomo Minor, Reichardt turned to First Cow (2021), a creative adaptation of Raymond’s sprawling novel, The Half-Life, co-starring Magaro, Orion Lee, and Toby Jones.

The acutely observed chamber Western—a kind of book-end narrative about white settlement in Oregon to Meek’s Cutoff–earned perhaps Reichardt’s widest acclaim to date, with awards and nominations from international festivals (it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival) and critics group. In 2022, Reichardt returned to her joint collaboration with writer Raymond and Michelle Williams for Showing Up, combining comedic elements and character study in the world of sculpture art.