Popular reviews

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  Review by Klipp ★★★★ 26

  Watch the full film at vimeo.com/333837341
  Password : benjamin

  Excuse the low quality & German subtitles. It's a rare bird.

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  Review by luke? ★★★

  Kelly Reichardt research marathon

  Was a bit harsh on this the first time I saw it, but I can appreciate the lo-fi quality it has. Also while doing research for the essay I'm doing I found a great quote from Kelly about making short films.

  "I had 10 years from the mid-1990s when I couldn’t get a movie made. It had a lot to do with being a woman. That’s definitely a factor in raising money. During that time, it was impossible to get anything going, so I just said, ‘Fuck you!’ and did Super 8 shorts instead."

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  Review by Josiah Morgan 2

  Americana folk-tale kind of thing from Reichardt, would love to see this developed a bit more to counteract her general pessimism as this one at least has some glimmers of hope in the midst of all the anger and destruction.

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  Review by Maria

  Of course Super 8 is the perfect medium to tell a folk tale. Those urban legends that everyone knows a version of, that are passed on from generation to generation. The lo-fi quality only enhances the feeling that it's a story shared among kids in a park. It's strange how these myths are created and maintained—this story started as a song, yet it feels true, it feels like someone telling you a story they heard. Each time it gets retold (song, novel, film, short film, whatever may come next), it only deepens its roots in Americana mythology. It might be a minor Reichardt, but it really doesn't feel that minor.

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  Review by Devon Green ★★★★★

  I've been trying to see this one for four+ years and finally found a private Vimeo link of a bootleg VHS transfer with terrible quality and German subtitles and even with all that in the way this was ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. Shot on super-8 in the long stretch between River Of Grass and Old Joy, this tale of small town teenage love gloriously finds Kelly Reichardt working in a different key than the Bressonian pacing and storytelling she would eventually become known for, while losing none of the copious magic and knack she posses for expressing beautiful, aching yearning in the inner lives of her (often wayward/misfit) characters. If anything the juxtaposition of quiet observation against more classical melodramatic tropes (including…

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  Review by Johann Rucker

  I'd kill for a proper release of this. Not sure if the VHS-rip quality added to the overall effect, but this is way more saccharine than is typical for Reichardt, right? So cute.

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  Review by Ronan Doyle ★★★½ 1

  A very underseen, and sadly ill-preserved mini-feature from Kelly Reichardt, Ode is an engagingly fatalistic tale of small-town dreams and the manner in which their very nature seems to repress them. I found it interesting to see how Reichardt, now most known for her plays upon the road movie formula, even here uses the road as a defining structure against which her characters lives' are measured. It's a little troublesome in terms of its performances, and the narrative itself encounters a couple of issues, but the emotion is all there, as is Reichardt's typically incisive viewpoint on modern America.

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  Review by Lee Does Not Exist सब्बे सत्ता सुखी होन्तु ★★★

  Did you know somebody loved him?

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  Review by Julian ★★★★½

  Didn't expect this to be top tier Reichardt but here we are I guess

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  Review by Nick R ★★★½

  A folk song on Super 8, this early Kelly Reichardt short has a warmth and personality that wasn't yet evident in her 1994 feature debut, River of Grass. It's an adaptation, somewhat bizarrely, of a novelization of the 1967 Bobby Gentry hit "Ode to Billie Joe," but Reichardt's rewritten dialogue and narration has a looseness to it that's all hers.

  Working fast and light with a small crew, Reichardt plays with impressionistic editing and manages to rustle up a dusky, dappled look from her limited resources. A fingerstyle score by the amazing Will Oldham (aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and later the star of Reichardt's of Old Joy) ties everything together. (That combined with a role by John Wurster, the drummer…

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★

  A very early and rather on the nose film from Reichardt. There’s one sequence where it finds itself but even in that, it’s all expositing emotion — and it’s never not formulaic. The points of conflict are very typical and the way they are handled doesn’t escape from this. A final plot point feels a bit crass, also. 

  The overall style detracts: overbearing music, overbearing narration. It feels like a made for TV documentary with recreations in it. The drama and character work feels stilted and the writing doesn’t help. It’s more disappointing because the filmmaker is usually so good at verisimilitude. This feels like a far cry from her strengths.

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  Review by rachel ★★★

  bobbie lee would have loved ethel cain