Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 64: Mon Mar 4

Showing Up (Reichardt, 2022): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm


A rare foray into the area of first-run films to highlight the extended run for this film, by one of our best contemporary directors, which is finally getting a UK run.

New Yorker review:
The story of Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor in Portland, Oregon, who’s preparing to exhibit at a local gallery—is an instant classic of a life in art. Kelly Reichardt, who wrote the script with Jon Raymond, invests the film’s meticulously observed action with a quiet yet passionate grandeur. Lizzy has a day job in the office of an art college—her boss is her mother, Jean (Maryann Plunkett)—and has too little time for her exquisite work, small clay statues of women. Her self-absorbed friend and neglectful landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), makes more spectacular art and has two prestigious shows opening at the same time. Lizzy’s vain father (Judd Hirsch), a retired potter, and her troubled brother (John Magaro), who is mentally ill, require her attention; amid her efforts to be both a good person and a good artist, her gruff and terse candor is a bulwark against frustration and distraction. Working with the cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, Reichardt films as if in a state of rapt attention, reserving her keenest ardor and inspiration for the art itself: as Lizzy sculpts and assembles and glazes and even just ponders, the film’s visual contemplations seem to get deep into Lizzy’s creative soul.
Richard Brody

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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