Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Kelly Reichardt (born 1964) typifies what happens to most women filmmakers whose debut feature earns great notices but doesn’t quite get the audience it deserves. After her 1994 debut, River of Grass , she didn’t release a follow-up for 12 years. That film, Old Joy (2006), was only made possible by $30,000 which she inherited. Adapting a short story by the writer Jonathan Raymond, who subsequently collaborated on scripts for Reichardt’s subsequent films, Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Night Moves (2013), it told the story of two men (Will Oldham and Daniel London) who go on a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Not much happens, but something does. Born in Miami, the daughter of a crime scene detective and an undercover narcotics officer, Reichardt makes films with a forensic level of detail; detail that captures your attention in the absence of a complicated plot. If Certain Women is anything to go by, her films don’t use music to tell us how ...

  Pictured : Mary ( Juliet Stevenson ) and a mysterious stranger ( Erin Doherty ) as viewed by John ( Jared Harris , not shown) in a scene from the fractured family drama, 'Reawakening ', a British film written and directed by Virginia Gilbert . Still courtesy of Eclipse Pictures (Ireland), Signature Entertainment (UK) To lose a child. To experience your child, aged fourteen, run away from home, never to return. To appeal to the media – the world – and hear nothing. To sit at home, blaming, fretting, focussing on one thing. To grieve without a body. To flinch at sympathy. To watch the bills mount up. To return to work, unwillingly. To shift focus but always revert to that central wrong. To repeat the question: why? To pretend - at work, at home, living with the fog of distraction and trauma. To carry on. Reawakening , British writer-director Virginia Gilbert’s second feature – her first was A Long Way from Home starring James Fox and Brenda Fricker released in 2013 – explore...