Showing Up

Director: Kelly Reichardt

2022 / 107min / DCP

Reichardt’s fourth film with crucial collaborator Michelle Williams has the star playing Lizzy, a Portland sculptor balancing the demands of her art school teaching gig, the stresses of a forthcoming gallery show, the problems of her fractured family, and the barbs of her conceptual artist landlord (Hong Chau). A bittersweet, dryly funny film about creative process, professional competitiveness, and the everyday obstacles to getting by as an artist in contemporary America—or trying to—anchored by Williams’s and Chau’s marvelously nuanced performances.

Part of American Landscapes: The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt