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“An amazing first film. . . . unlike most movies drawn from personal experience, River of Grass roundly rejects the sentimentality and political correctness often associated with confessional dramas—particularly those which focus on women.”—Todd Haynes

Both a sun-drenched take on film noir and a roadless road movie, Reichardt’s impressive debut River of Grass announced the arrival of a fresh, original voice on the American indie scene.

Returning to her native Florida to shoot in the Everglades, Reichardt drew from her own experience growing up as the daughter of a crime scene investigator and an undercover narcotics agent. Cozy (real-life waitress Lisa Bowman), a bored, reluctant working-class mother squeezed into trashy hot pants, falls for Lee Ray (future director Larry Fessenden, the film’s editor), a shady character from the wrong side of the tracks. Mismatched and clumsy, this would-be Bonnie and Clyde are comically stymied in their unlawful pursuits at every turn, while the barren backdrop of strip malls and swampy fields provides a pointedly ironic comment on their maladroit desperado antics. Voted one of the best films of 1995 by The Village Voice and Film Comment, this “screwball neo-Breathless” (Scott Foundas, CinemaScope) blends cool, detached irony with an underlying sense of melancholia and modern malaise. “A smart little deadpan honey of a comedy about the way America has exhausted its pop-culture myths” (Jay Carr, The Boston Globe).