Kelly Reichardt

[Matt]

Night Moves is a movie I respect but didn’t really enjoy. I can’t point to anything particular that I had a problem with. It might just be that Jesse Eisenberg is not, to me, an interesting screen presence. He played his opaque and unlikeable character perfectly though, and I actually found the last third

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when it becomes a character study of how far someone will go to protect himself and yet never feel protected

was far more interesting than the first two thirds, which is your basic heist movie setup stripped down. I also enjoyed when

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his character is told that the explosion of the dam was pointless because there are so many other dams in place and that, oh, by the way, that explosion killed someone

which is what sets the third act in motion.

Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (and her other films as well) explores similar off-the-grid characters (though the plot has nothing in common with Reichardt’s film). I think it, though maybe more conventional in style, provides a better way into these characters’ lives and ways of thinking.

Reichardt’s own First Cow feels similar and better, working with a similar “heist” plot but on a much smaller scale, and the heist feels necessary for survival and not a perhaps misguided attempt at social righteousness.

Haven’t seen the How to Blow Up a Pipeline movie and probably don’t really care to.

[therewillbeblus]

I've come to believe Night Moves is Reichardt's masterpiece, especially after realizing the profound subtext she's issuing in my last watch (spread across two posts on the previous page). It's so risky, provocative, and rich - 'attuned minimalism' weaponized to coerce us into sitting with the mud of moral sacrifice against self-preservation. It's especially daring in an age of escalating public sociopolitical extremism, cheekily using one subset of progressive groups to unveil how not even they -who demand clarity and that everyone subscribes to their version of what that clarity 'is'- can evade the grayness of life conflict. The slowness isn't utilized so much to demonstrate moments of grace in human interaction nor the thrills in the banal moments of missions, but cumulatively prioritizes focus on the loneliness and insecurity that seeps into even the tightest of ideological bubbles