| 100 |
Entertainment Weekly
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.
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| 100 |
Salon.com
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.
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| 100 |
LA Weekly
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.
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| 100 |
The New York Times
A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.
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| 100 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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.
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| 91 |
Baltimore Sun
A spare, trembling lyric poem of a movie that uses stillness and facial blips the way melodramas use showdowns and action films big bangs.
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| 91 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Old Joy doesn't try for too much, but its subtle victories leave plenty to savor.
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| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
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.
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| 90 |
Washington Post
It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.
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| 90 |
Chicago Reader
This quiet, elegiac road movie hinges on a few beautifully underplayed scenes between Daniel London and Will Oldham.
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| 90 |
The New Republic
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.
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| 88 |
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.
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| 88 |
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.
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| 88 |
Boston Globe
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.
|
| 80 |
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.
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| 80 |
New York Magazine
Against a radiant backdrop of decay and rebirth, nothing needs to be said; everything in this lovely film is crystalline.
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| 80 |
Variety
A beautifully nuanced study in friendship and the irretrievability of the past.
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| 80 |
Village Voice
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.
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| 80 |
Empire
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.
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| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
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.
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| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
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.
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| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
The result is a film that fails to completely involve you, even as you admire its artistry.
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| 50 |
New York Daily News
Features some of the year's most beautiful scenery and two of its most wooden characters.
|
| 25 |
New York Post
You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.
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