Lizzy Carr (Michelle Williams), the central character of Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” is a sculptor who is finishing up a series of ceramic figures she’ll be presenting in a gallery show. We see her working, throughout the movie, on the small clay statues — all women, each one about a foot tall, some mounted on rods, all with an intentionally rough, patchy surface that may look awkward and unpolished if you’re close up to it, but when you stand back a bit you see the aesthetic elegance of her style. (Giacometti would understand.) She’s making sculptures of female characters who look a bit ghostly in their lack of perfect line, but that’s part of their design (they all appear a little tormented), and that quality is balanced by the delicate surprise colors they’re painted with, which express their inner life. There’s no question: Lizzy has talent.
- 5/27/2022
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Michelle Williams plays struggling Portland artist Lizzie with subtlety in the First Cow director’s latest film
Subtlety and reticence are the keynotes of this diverting if insistently downbeat new picture from Kelly Reichardt, photographed in the soft, indie-stonewashed colours that are part of this director’s signature. An artist and ceramicist in Portland, Oregon is on the verge of an important new show, but she’s plagued with personal problems. Her neighbour-slash-landlady is failing to fix the hot water in her apartment. Her cat has almost killed a pigeon in their street and she feels obliged to look after the poor injured thing in a cardboard box, instead of working. Her mother (an administrator in the community arts centre where the artist works) is querulously estranged from her dad, who appears to have freeloading house guests from Canada. And her bipolar brother, who also has artistic leanings, is digging...
Subtlety and reticence are the keynotes of this diverting if insistently downbeat new picture from Kelly Reichardt, photographed in the soft, indie-stonewashed colours that are part of this director’s signature. An artist and ceramicist in Portland, Oregon is on the verge of an important new show, but she’s plagued with personal problems. Her neighbour-slash-landlady is failing to fix the hot water in her apartment. Her cat has almost killed a pigeon in their street and she feels obliged to look after the poor injured thing in a cardboard box, instead of working. Her mother (an administrator in the community arts centre where the artist works) is querulously estranged from her dad, who appears to have freeloading house guests from Canada. And her bipolar brother, who also has artistic leanings, is digging...
- 5/27/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
In “Showing Up,” Michelle Williams stars as Lizzy, a Portland-based sculptor for whom little seems to go right in the week leading up to a big solo show. Kelly Reichardt’s latest film takes us to modern-day Portland for a playful comedy about the realities of visual artists.
As Lizzy, Williams is frazzled and grumpy, stern and flustered. She meets compliments with a downcast gaze, doubtful, perhaps, that she’s worthy of them. She lives alone with a very good bad cat, working on figurines of young women, while her colleagues drink and hang out during their off-hours.
As a day job, she works at an arts college she once attended as an assistant to her mother, who she must ask for days off to work on her art, while her father (the great Judd Hirsch) entertains guests he barely knows. Her brother Sean lives a sheltered life on his own,...
As Lizzy, Williams is frazzled and grumpy, stern and flustered. She meets compliments with a downcast gaze, doubtful, perhaps, that she’s worthy of them. She lives alone with a very good bad cat, working on figurines of young women, while her colleagues drink and hang out during their off-hours.
As a day job, she works at an arts college she once attended as an assistant to her mother, who she must ask for days off to work on her art, while her father (the great Judd Hirsch) entertains guests he barely knows. Her brother Sean lives a sheltered life on his own,...
- 5/27/2022
- by Fran Hoepfner
- The Wrap
“First Cow” may not have been anywhere near as soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film about desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul. Or, a fowl, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up,” who reluctantly finds herself nursing an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite career.
The good news is that nobody gets buried with their best friend or has to leave them behind; this isn’t the kind of movie in which people die so much as one where everyone wears overalls and André Benjamin plays the patient kiln master at an Oregon arts college. The bad news is...
The good news is that nobody gets buried with their best friend or has to leave them behind; this isn’t the kind of movie in which people die so much as one where everyone wears overalls and André Benjamin plays the patient kiln master at an Oregon arts college. The bad news is...
- 5/27/2022
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
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