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i must have seen a different film!!

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Absolutely Fantastic

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Now I know what Meek Cuts off. It is your consciousness. You will soon be asleep.

US indie female filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's antebellum western allegory MEEK'S CUTOFF is an odd addition to the hallowed genre, with an entire ensemble cast of 9, traversing through the Oregon High Desert with their wagons. There are three families of settlers, Emily (Williams) and Solomon Tetherow (Patton), Thomas and Mille Gately (Dano and Kazan), William and Glory White (Huff and Henderson) with their teenage son Jimmy (Nelson) plus the titular Stephen Meek (Greenwood), their guide. But Meek's cutoff doesn't pan out as he has promised, their journey is prolonged with no clear improvement in sight, morale begins to pall and water is in shortage, when they capture a solitary Indian (Rondeaux) and foist him to lead them to water, rift will soon divide themselves, but to what end? Reichardt confects something very anti-climatic along the line. Adhering to the tenet of preserving and reflecting naturalistic pulchritude of its expansive surroundings, the film certainly takes its time to observe human actions under this primordial circumstances and often the camera stays put and lets the narrative take its own course within the frame; similarly during the night scenery, only candlelight and campfire is used against a pitch- black night or the interior of a tent. This minimalist approach makes for an intimate study of those settlers, especially of the women front, upgrades them from an often underrepresented and/or stereotyped fix to the spotlight, it is mostly through Emily Tetherow, the story manages to bring forth its central conflict of trust, (mis)understanding, fortitude and belief. Who can they trust, is it Meek, an supposedly experienced guide who gradually loses other's trust due to his inexplicable incapability? Or the Indian, who could be dangerously duplicitous, and their communication is gravely undermined by their language barrier. Emily makes her choice (with tact too), and the film broaches an abrupt open ending without confirmation of either because there mustn't be any consolation prize, no fight-or-flight finale, let the uncertainty rule, just for once.Reichardt doesn't give much dramatic outpourings to her cracking cast but Michelle Williams still holds court and gives a contained but gritty performance head and shoulders above her male co- stars, Bruce Greenwood is remotely next-in-line radiant with his curmudgeonly ambiguity, but ruefully, there is little is on offer. Regardless of its invigorating feminist angle of a less fluid story, Reichardt's film seems to brandish her "anti" flag too willfully and what is ultimately sacrificed here is a culminating catharsis dissipates even before its tentative luring of actualization.

A total waste of 2 hours. Scenery was awesome, characters were pretty cool, but the photography/directing was horrible. The story had a chance, the location and characters gave it their best, and with a little direction and normal use of photography it could have been a good movie. Mad at myself for watching it all.

Presented in Academy ratio and operating within an immeasurable form of time and space, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is a Revisionist Western that examines the ways in which history has been purported. Following the titular Stephen Meek (a gruff Bruce Greenwood) as he guides a caravan of settlers through the most unforgiving reaches of the Oregon territory, Meek's Cutoff questions the reliability of the traditional West as a whole, as there is little Meek himself offers to the journey other than misguidance and racial bigotry. Rather than the valiant male hero of the Mythic West that audiences have been subjected to time and time again, Reichardt reverses the role, placing it into the hands of the more than capable and collaborative mainstay, Michelle Williams.This subversion of character allows for the story to operate centrally from the perspective of Williams' Emily Tetherow, although the men are portrayed as – strictly in appearance – still in control. Classical motifs of the Western such as villainous Native Americans, gun violence, and the heroic male are abandoned for an honest perspective of the era in which it is the err of the male which destroys rather than their courageous heroics as a saving grace. This refusal to abide by the clichés of the Mythic West, allows Reichardt to heavily scrutinize the trail in which her ensemble trudges along to have been eventually named after the moronic, fraudulent, and brutish Stephen Meek.Opening with the setting of the film's events, "Oregon 1945," yet occupying a spatial form that adheres to the lack of physical actualities – as if the characters are traveling through a rift – observed in Monte Hellman's The Shooting as well as Ben Wheatley's A Field in England. As in, while the journey's end is the character's goal (i.e., the pub in A Field in England or Kingston in The Shooting), it is irrelevant to Reichardt's objective. The characters venture endlessly, while nature itself eventually takes on its own character as an unforgiving and opposing force. This push-and-pull of man versus himself allows for nature to continuously creep upon the caravan, slowly eradicating any glimpse of hope. It is the systematic form in which nature then attempts to disband and discourage Tetherow and company that reflects the work of Hellman, as it is their humanly misgivings that allow for the absence of worriment for far more worldly and pertinent conflicts. Concluding in a sudden yet incredibly appropriate moment, Reichardt ends the film only partway through the journey. For, as the aforementioned stated, the destination never had any distinct relevance to the story. Meaning that, while the viewer yearns for the caravan to reach its end- goal, Reichardt's vision calls for a completely different experience. The removal of Stephen Meek from power and the bond formed between Emily and The Indian – women and Native Americans as two groups that have been heavily oppressed by men – is the catharsis in which Reichardt plays with. As if Meek's Cutoff serves as rectifying tale for the mistreatment of the previously stated parties, Reichardtseeks to set the record of the Old West straight, while offering an equally distant and unique, yet poetically minimalist cinematic experience at the same time.