“I was just thinking that of all the trails in this life, there is one that matters more than all the others. It is the trail of a true human being” — Kicking Bird in the film “Dances with Wolves” Kelly Reichardt’s (“Certain Women”) First Cow is a song to nature, a tribute to intimacy…
I’m not totally sure if A Vigilante — the feature debut from writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson — is meant to be soaked up as entertainment so much as a reconciliation between movies-as-art and movies-as-therapy. The small-scale story is interested in a single dominating issue, that of domestic violence, though in ways that feels inconsistently intentioned, despite…
“We are not lost, we are just finding our way” — Stephen Meek, “Meek’s Cutoff” As depicted in “Wendy and Lucy” and “Meek’s Cutoff,” Kelly Reichardt’s characters are lost without a significant guidepost to hold on to, adrift in a society in which they struggle to fit in. Based on short stories from the 2009…
As nail-bitingly intense as it is darkly funny, Jeremy Saulnier’s sophomore effort Blue Ruin is the kind of film that comes down the line and launches careers for all talent involved. A work of sheer craft, it’s a movie that takes a very standard set-up and wears its influences on its sleeve, yet still manages…
