Oregonian filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s fourth collaboration with actress Michelle Williams is a quietly brilliant and funny portrait of an artist and her MFA milieu. It’s also further confirmation that Williams, who can manifest characters as varied as Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Fabelman, Gwen Verdon and now Lizzy of Showing Up, is a talent as rare as the finest actors in the language, including Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl Streep. We open the film this Friday at the Monica Film Center and Laemmle Glendale, April 28 at the NoHo, and May 5 at the Newhall and Claremont.
“Reichardt reflects an abiding respect for artists and their freedom to explore and process while Williams inhabits the soul of a creative being in every frame and every second.” ~ Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News
“The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine
“Showing Up is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times
“Brilliantly nuanced and meticulously observed.” ~ Claudia Puig, FilmWeek (KPCC – NPR Los Angeles)
“That this moody, woozy character study falls closer to the ‘masterpiece’ side of the fence isn’t a surprise, considering it comes from Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, one of the best filmmaker-actor duos of the last quarter century.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone
“What initially seems to be a slice-of-life drama eventually reveals itself as a paean to the difficulties, and rewards, of making art.” ~ David Sims, The Atlantic
“Kelly Reichardt… turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.” ~ Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post