Kelly Reichardt
Where does Kelly Reichardt teach?
What is the next Kelly Reichardt movie?
What is unique about Kelly Reichardt’s filmmaking style?
The sound of water trickling in a Pacific Northwest rainforest. World news intruding on a person’s inner thoughts through a car radio. A dog amiably trotting next to a solitary person walking. Sustained moments of silence in a conversation between people attempting to make themselves understood. A freight train trundling heavy industrial loads through a small-town American landscape. A close-up of a woman trying—and failing—to conceal her desperation or longing from showing on her face. These are a few of the recurring images, sounds, and themes in the charged, contemplative films of American director Kelly Reichardt. Since making her feature film debut in 1994 with River of Grass, Reichardt has carved a unique path as a fiercely independent filmmaker with a distinctive voice. Her notable later movies include Night Moves (2013), Certain Women (2016), and Showing Up (2022).
Early years
- Birth date: March 3, 1964
- Birthplace: Miami, Florida, U.S.
- Education: School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, BFA
- Known for: Directing feature films in a slow-paced, naturalistic style
- Full-length films: River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Night Moves (2013), Certain Women (2016), First Cow (2019), Showing Up (2022), and The Mastermind (2025)
Reichardt was born and raised in Miami in a law enforcement family: her mother was a narcotics agent, and her father worked as a crime-scene investigator. In fifth grade she started borrowing her father’s camera and taking photographs. As a teenager, she dropped out of high school and worked various jobs, including at a record store, and kept taking pictures, especially of the people and ocean of Miami Beach. She eventually earned her GED and took some community college classes, but hungry to leave her hometown and experience more of the world, she headed north to Boston.
There Reichardt quickly fell in with other young artists and became interested in filmmaking. She enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and began making movies of her own. She also frequented a local repertory movie theater, where she soaked up film history. Reichardt was especially inspired by the work of directors Satyajit Ray, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Jim Jarmusch, as well as more avant-garde or experimental filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Maya Deren, and George Kuchar.
After obtaining a BFA from Tufts, Reichardt moved to New York City in 1988 and began working in costume and art departments on several films made by other young directors starting their careers. One of those movies was Poison (1991), directed by Todd Haynes, who became a close friend and later produced several of her feature films.
River of Grass and Old Joy
In 1994 Reichardt’s first feature, River of Grass, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Shot in locations she knew well from her childhood, the film follows an unhappy mother of two who meets an alluring man at a bar and goes on the run with him, staying in various motels in south Florida. Despite the movie receiving a warm reception from festival audiences and respectful notices from critics, it would be a dozen years before Reichardt would complete another feature. In the intervening years, she honed her filmmaking skills by creating several short films using a Super-8 camera, including the 48-minute Ode (1999). She also began teaching film at various institutions in New York City, including the School of Visual Arts and New York University.
In 2006 Reichardt directed her second full-length movie, Old Joy, whose production she financed with a $30,000 inheritance from a great-aunt. The film, written by Reichardt and novelist Jonathan Raymond, with whom she collaborated on several subsequent movies, follows a pair of friends (played by Daniel London and musician Will Oldham) whose paths have diverged until they attempt to reconnect with each other on a camping trip to the Cascade Mountains outside Portland, Oregon. Old Joy marked the maturation of Reichardt’s signature understated style, with her use of natural settings to underscore ambivalent human relationships. In a review of the film, Roger Ebert wrote: “Sometimes the greatest drama can take place between the lines, or outside the province of the frame, and all we notice is a pause or a glance. Or a shot of a slug moving across some moss.…There are unarticulated tensions, feelings of sorrow, unease and even dread that course through the movie like a hidden creek.”
Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, and Certain Women
Reichardt next directed Wendy and Lucy (2008). Released amid the Great Recession, the movie is an empathetic but unsparing portrait of a woman (played by Michelle Williams) traveling from Indiana to find work in Alaska whose car breaks down in Oregon, causing her to struggle to pay for a repair and to feed her dog. The New Yorker stated that Wendy and Lucy “cement[ed] her [Reichardt’s] place as a master minimalist.” She collaborated again with Williams on the western Meek’s Cutoff (2010), which centered on a group of emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Contrary to the typical focus in westerns on men and violence, Reichardt chose to foreground the hard labor involved in surviving, much of it done by women.
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Reichardt’s movies are known for having a slower pace than the typical Hollywood production. As Vanity Fair observed in 2020, “there’s a stillness to many of her compositions, held long past when another director would have called ‘cut.’ Only a philistine would call them ‘boring,’ but it is fair to call them ‘patient.’ That approach can be disconcerting to the uninitiated; watching a Reichardt movie means, at times, essentially watching nothing happen.”
After having subverted the conventions of the western, Reichardt next put her stamp on the thriller genre in Night Moves (2013), which she cowrote with Raymond. The film follows a group of radical environmentalists (played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard) whose bond is fractured in the aftermath of their bombing a hydroelectric dam in an act of ecoterrorism. Reichardt then directed Certain Women (2016), an anthology film based on several short stories by Maile Meloy, which follows the subtly intersecting paths of four women in Montana. Critics especially praised the performances of the movie’s ensemble, singling out the acting of newcomer Lily Gladstone, who plays a ranch hand who develops an aching crush on a young lawyer (Kristen Stewart). Certain Women also marked Reichardt’s third collaboration with Williams and her first time working with Laura Dern. It was also her most commercially successful outing to date, being her only film to gross more than $1 million in domestic box office receipts.
First Cow, Showing Up, and The Mastermind
Reichardt returned to the period western with First Cow (2019), which she again cowrote with Raymond. Set in a frontier fur-trading settlement in Oregon Country in the 1820s, First Cow centers on the friendship between Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee). The pair—a bashful white baker from the eastern United States and a big-dreaming Chinese immigrant, respectively—come up with a plan to steal the milk from the first cow to arrive in the region, which belongs to a prominent local businessman, and use it to bake doughnutlike “oily cakes.” Reichardt is known for her fastidious attention to detail—she said in a 2024 interview that she “spent a good three months obsessing over the cricket sounds in First Cow”—and critics hailed the movie’s thoroughly realized depiction of life on the frontier and the central characters’ relationship.
In 2022 Reichardt connected with Williams once more, this time on Showing Up, a comedic drama about a sculptor who contends with various distractions as she prepares for a solo show of her ceramic figures. Williams praised her frequent director in a 2023 New York Times article: “She’s very decisive and uncompromising and she has a vision in her head and nothing is going to stop her from getting that on the screen.”
In 2025 Reichardt wrote and directed the crime drama The Mastermind, which stars Josh O’Connor as a small-time art thief on the run after stealing several Arthur Dove paintings from a museum. In a departure for the director, it was set in Massachusetts, in the 1970s. The Guardian wrote of the movie that the “dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.”
Exhibitions and teaching
Reichardt’s work has been the subject of several museum retrospectives, including the 2017 mid-career retrospective exhibition Kelly Reichardt: Powerfully Observant at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to her film work, since 2006 she has been a teacher of film at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.