River Of Grass / press

River of Grass / press
River of Grass | cast | crew | notes | press

Dave Kehr, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
"Highly original and filmed with perfect assurance...one of the finest independent films of recent years."

Godfrey Cheshire, NEW YORK PRESS
"Every bit as good as Monte Hellman's TWO LANE BLACKTOP"

Kevin Thomas, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"A lively, entertaining movie about how life isn't like the movies."

J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
"One of year's smartest indies. Not for squares."

Dave Kehr, THE DAILY NEWS
"From BONNIE AND CLYDE to NATURAL BORN KILLERS American audiences have embraced the theme of young lovers on the run, engaged in sexy revolt against middle class conventions. Kelly Reichardt's RIVER OF GRASS, a funny, sad and honest independent film, is the first American movie to deconstruct that myth."

J. Carr, BOSTON GLOBE, 12/15/1995
"Kelly Reichardt's RIVER OF GRASS is a smart little deadpan honey of a comedy about the way America has exhausted its pop-culture myths - maybe is simply too tired to get inside them anymore. A lot of would-be noire road movies spin their wheels, but RIVER OF GRASS does so on purpose. That's the joke. The film's impact is enhanced because it's set in a singularly washed-out looking landscape, Florida's Broward County, where only strip malls separate Miami from the swampy Everglades. Like all good neo-noirs, this one, though laconic, is tightly focused and revolves around a woman who's trouble.

Fessenden puts amusing spin on Lee Ray's increasing claminess, Bowman finds ways to make petulance diverting as Cozy, and Jimmy Ryder, as Cozy's gunless - and suspended - cop dad stews with what you suspect might be real danger, despite the cockeyed way in which it's packaged.

RIVER OF GRASS reaches its apotheosis when Cozy and Lee find themselves a quarter short on a toll bridge and are turned back towards Miami by a stern lecturing cop. Wicked stuff tickling away beneath the nothingness here. Reichardt's satire is directed just as devastatingly at present-day mindlessness and its inability to reinvent pop myth as against the clichŽs people inhabit as a substitute for living. And yet there's an affection for the cultural and spiritual meltdown her film's world embraces. RIVER OF GRASS is incisive and funny. What's even rarer, it's simultaneously subversive and compassionate. Reichardt is a filmmaker to watch."

River of Grass | cast | crew | notes | press