Whoa, where did this Kelly Reichardt come from? Before we've hit the three-minute mark we've seen zippy Truffaut-style still photo montages, campy, splattery murder scenes recalling John Waters, a bit of nudity and what On the Hour referred to as the corrupting influence of bebop jazz. I imagine at the time this was referred to as Tarantino-esque - it was released in the same year as Pulp Fiction - though I'm increasingly coming to think early Tarantino was just the most complete expression of a set of proudly trashy, transgressive aesthetic and narrative concerns that so many of his generation were into. If he hadn't existed, maybe his position in popular culture would have been taken by Gregg Araki, or…

River of Grass deserves to be mentioned alongside those unique and remarkably auspicious debut features that sprung onto the American independent scene in the early to mid-nineties. A list that includes, but is not limited to, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, Kevin Smith's Clerks, Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven and Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight.

Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt (b. 1964), the film is an astutely rendered neo-noir that partakes in the genre's conventions in order to cunningly subvert them. However, unlike a number of other such films, it feels like the genuine, thoughtfully fleshed out article rather than another tired, self-conscious exercise. Reichardt, who was born and raised in Miami, has suitably set her effort…

Reichardt would go on to explore similar themes of lost souls, poverty and the coalescing of humans and landscapes in her later work perhaps a little more astutely, but I really like the grungy, dirty aesthetic here. As others have said, it’s like a failed Badlands. Not ‘failed’ because the film is bad, but because the characters are a little dim and can’t even pull off a run from the law correctly. In fact they don’t even kill anyone. In a lot of ways the two protagonists want to live out their life of crime movie fantasy to escape lives they’re not happy with anyway. Despair permeates throughout, but there’s not a sadness over a particular thing. These characters don’t…