Showing Up

There’s been no better movie to encapsulate the year, and no better movie, period, than Kelly Reichardt’s matchless Showing Up, which is all about making art in a world that also requires you to make money.

Not only is Showing Up the best movie of the year, it’s arguably the one most in need of rescue. That’s your cue, friends.

[Reichardt and Williams's] shorthand creates its own universe, and it's as insular as the world they're depicting. Outsiders will likely feel like they're showing up without an invite.

The comedy is often as dry as an untouched paintbrush.

Like Lizzy’s sculptures, there’s a wounded tactility at work here—in miniature, even. What you get out of it will depend on your patience for such thoughtful if prickly work.

The film is a testament to my favorite kind of character, the ones who go about their lives in a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other manner.

The movie is slow-paced, and nothing much happens on screen, but if someone wants to see a bond blossom between two completely different women in the most tangible of ways, this is their movie.

To spend a week with Lizzy is to spend a week filled with contradictions, doubt, stress, conflict, immense creativity — and immense love.

[The film] shines not in the attentive moments where Lizzy fine-tunes her sculptures, but rather when it shows how the conditions of creative labour can often turn us off from wanting to create.

Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up is the first of her uniformly excellent films to truly resonate with me.