"Meek’s Cutoff is a late-blooming western, another monotonous miracle. Reichardt is treading the prime territory of Budd Boetticher, another similarly unsentimental American director whose westerns are anchored by unchanging, ungiving faces tired of life (Randolph Scott for Boetticher, Williams for Reichardt), and whose stealth concern is how many different permutations of trees-rocks-cacti can be configured across seventy minutes. Meek’s is about the hardship of hauling stuff thousands of miles by wagon (a process never more aridly depicted in the movies). Zoe Kazan, in a fried yellow dress that has lost all its MGM prairie charm, chases her hat blown away in a windstorm, which gives Reichardt and cameraman Chris Blauvelt an excuse to stage a breathtakingly parched scene: as Blauvelt cranes up to the heavens, Kazan is pinched into the punishingly cracked and craggy desert ground, while the camera does a sideways slide over her head. The resulting image suggests a scary-open landscape watched over by the eye of a Kenji Mizoguchi ghost-god who has long lost patience with these miserable pilgrims."

I wrote about Kelly Reichardt in my latest column for the Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2020 issue—read on! I'm on page 80: gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/02/23/essay-world-according-kelly-reichardt/