Wendy and Lucy

Old Joy director Kelly Reichardt crafts this intimate tale of Wendy, an alienated Indiana woman who packs up her car and sets her sights on Alaska, but finds herself stranded in a small Oregon town with no money and only her faithful dog, Lucy, to keep her company. When Wendy realizes that there's ...more

In this current social clime of post-everything, where media has become a hyper-self-aware bombardment of conflicting imagery and ideas that fail again and again to capture the gravity of being young and alive, the relevance of a film like Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy resonates in its charged silences. The story of Wendy Carroll, a young girl on a road trip from Indiana to find some possibly lucrative work at a fish cannery in Alaska, is presented in the same sparse, engaging storytelling ...more

Kelly Reichardt has always been a filmmaker engaged with the harsh realities of economic struggle in America. Her dryly funny debut, River of Grass, and the superb Old Joy are both thematically potent, socially conscious cinema, but they're also distinguished by indelible characters, mordant wit, and memorable images. While Wendy and Lucy, her third theatrical feature, has much to recommend it, it does not achieve those cinematic heights. Reichardt and cinematographer Sam Levy capture the decay ...more