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Old Joy
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Universal acclaim
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 45 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Jonathan Raymond
Kelly Reichardt
Directed by: Kelly Reichardt
Release Date:
Theatrical: September 20, 2006
DVD: May 1, 2007
Running Time: 76 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith, Robin Rosenberg, and Keri Moran
Old Joy is the story of two old friends, Kurt (Oldham) and Mark (London), who reunite for a weekend camping trip in the Cascade mountain range east of Portland, Oregon. (Kino International)
Also On Metacritic
MUSIC: Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Matt Sweeney: Superwolf Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Master And Everyone Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Summer In The Southeast Bonnie "Prince" Billy: The Letting Go Tortoise & Bonnie "Prince" Billy: The Brave And The Bold
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site Film Forum Profile
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
It's in all the moments where little happens that Reichardt is most amazing, investing even a gas-station pit stop with perfect emotional pitch.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Old Joy is only 76 minutes long, but it has the contemplative power of Buddhist meditation. Reichardt gives us long, stoned takes of rural roads; shots of birds, insects and slugs in the spectacular Oregon rain forest; interludes with Mark's dog, Lucy. Some viewers may well be bored, or monumentally irritated, by this. I found it masterly, riveting.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
The movie's scale is minuscule, but the physical and emotional landscapes it travels are as broad, deep and mysterious as the human psyche itself.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
For all the ephemeral pleasure of the company of old friends, there is a chasm between them and the dynamics shift from moment to moment. The beauty of the film is how director Kelly Reichardt brilliantly captures those moments with lucid simplicity.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
A spare, trembling lyric poem of a movie that uses stillness and facial blips the way melodramas use showdowns and action films big bangs.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Old Joy doesn't try for too much, but its subtle victories leave plenty to savor.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
Miniaturist in its level of detail and evocatively abstract, Old Joy captures the weary mood of a generation that's crested its peak along with an era, quietly making a case for how well suited film can be to capturing the finer points of human interaction while preserving their mystery.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
This quiet, elegiac road movie hinges on a few beautifully underplayed scenes between Daniel London and Will Oldham.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
A good Listless Film carries a double melancholy for all: it makes us sad for its characters and sad for the world that has thus affected them. Old Joy is such a film.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jason Anderson
A precise, subtle and emotionally affecting portrait of the fraying friendship between two men, director Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is an increasingly rare sort of American independent film: It aspires to be something other than a Hollywood movie with less money.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Staff (Not credited)
Without relying on dialogue, and once again making good but sparing use of Yo La Tengo's toasty guitar soundtrack, Reichardt proves herself a filmmaker with a masterful sense of the expressive purity of the passing moment.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Kurt and Mark's trip to those hot springs is a figurative return to Eden. Anyone who's had a disillusioning reunion with a moony old friend knows what Mark discovers: They're too old to stay that innocent. None of this hit me until after the movie ended. But it hit me hard: You can't go home again.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Don R. Lewis
A superb exercise in economical filmmaking. Not only from a financial standpoint, as the film was shot in HD and on-location in gorgeous Portland, Oregon…but the story here is so subtle and well drawn, if you blink you might miss it.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Against a radiant backdrop of decay and rebirth, nothing needs to be said; everything in this lovely film is crystalline.
Read Full Review >Variety Scott Foundas
A beautifully nuanced study in friendship and the irretrievability of the past.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.
Read Full Review >Empire David Parkinson
Making exceptional use of stillness and silence, this is a rather sad study of the passing of traditional concepts of American masculinity along with the landscape that forged them.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman
Old Joy is an accurately observed slice of that moment between postadolescence and parenthood, when friends cling or scatter, and circumstances force buried feelings to the fore.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The movie has a large theme, even if it's unspoken. Old Joy is about a particular friendship, but it's also about how American society changed in the '90s and the new century.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
The result is a film that fails to completely involve you, even as you admire its artistry.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Features some of the year's most beautiful scenery and two of its most wooden characters.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.5 (out of 10) based on 45 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Will N. gave it a3:
Pace is so slow that I could have been real time.
Michael G. gave it an8:
This film moves slowly, but it stayed with me. I woke up wondering how the characters were doing.
Kara gave it a0:
This is one of the stupidest movies I have ever seen. I truly fail to understand how it got such rave reviews. I would like to add that Chad's review of this movie was even more stupid than the movie. Congratulations.
Rick B. gave it a0:
This was clearly the most boring movie I have ever seen in my life - no small feat. I didn't feel any empathy with either character. How professional reviewers could rave about this movie is a complete mystery. The only action worth watching was Lucy, the dog.
Scott S. gave it a3:
Hey Chad: Sometimes a shoulder rub is just a shoulder rub. And, trees are not phallic symbols when you're in the woods; they're "the woods".
PnArdy PnArdy gave it a2:
Two old friends go on a picnic to talk about their wannabe lives. Boring. Skipped to the end.
Chad S. gave it an8:
What happens at the hot springs, stays at the hot springs. Even we don't know. "Old Joy", a film that could be described as "Chuck & Buck Go Camping", wisely goes for the shot of omission after Kurt(Will Oldham) goes for Mark's shoulders. Lucy knows. As Kurt and Mark head towards their car, Mark's clingy dog walks well ahead of the two men. Hmmm. In the opening scene, we see Mark(Daniel London), a Buddhist, meditating on his lawn. About what? Hmmm. All those tracking shots of rural Oregon as seen through their moving vehicle isn't there for just scenery's sake. It's what both men are looking at as they're thinking. There's sexual tension in all the objects that appear through the car window, and later, in the woods. I don't know what Terrence Malick has in mind when he shoots nature in close-up, but this filmmaker is telling a narrative about latent homosexuality through the use of sublimated objects. That slug, that bird, not to mention, the trees(read: phallic symbol), are all used as foreshadowing to the moment when Kurt gives Mark a massage. "Old Joy" is not a peaceful journey into the country. It just might be about the sham of marriage. This is scary stuff.
