American Outsider: The Films of Kelly Reichardt — Mubi.com
Over her three-decade career, director Kelly Reichardt has established herself as an icon of a minimalist, independent American cinema that deals with working-class antiheroes striving in the margins of a society that’s still sold as the epitome of a meritocratic dream available to anyone who works hard enough.
As her ninth film — the distinctively quiet and psychologically focused The Mastermind — is released in the US, Mubi offers a small selection of works by the director that showcase her wry-humoured philosophy, including her 1994 debut, River of Grass, and her 2013 drama Night Moves about a group of eco-activists whose lives are upended when they decide to engage in direct action against an Oregon electric dam.
The Asset — Netflix
Clara Dessau stars in this Danish thriller series as an undercover agent tasked with befriending the girlfriend of a notorious gangster. As she becomes more deeply involved with the world of her subject, she faces a tough decision: whether to complete her mission and bring down the gang or save a young woman from her demons and help her to become the person she could have been before she was lured into the underworld.
Finding Optel — Showmax
Fresh from its debut at this year’s London Film Festival, directors Jesse and Mikalya Joy Brown’s sweet comic adventure has a fine sense of place and a host of well-drawn loveable characters. Local teen Claire Abrahams runs a lost and found service, promising to find anything and everything that has been misplaced. The search for a lost dog called Optel turns out to be Claire’s biggest and most challenging case.
Navajo Police: Class 57 — Showmax
Filmed over the course of a year, this Emmy-nominated docuseries shines a light on the challenges faced by the graduates of the Navajo reservation’s police academy, the US’s only tribal law enforcement agency with its own academy. On the largest reservation in the country, a force of only 180 must patrol and navigate the tensions of a community of 190,000 people over an area as big as West Virginia (more than 62,000km²) and try to ensure that they don’t burn out and become one of the 50% of officers who leave the force in exasperation.
A House of Dynamite — Netflix
Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) tackles the uncertainties of America’s politics in this taut political thriller. After an unidentified missile of unknown origin is launched towards the country, the race is on to determine where it comes from and how the nation should respond.
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