Named to over sixty Best-of-2008 and even many Best-of-the-Decade lists, Wendy and Lucy solidified Reichardt's reputation for films that are “a touchstone of the new realism in American cinema” (New York Times). Drifting upwards to Alaska like a twenty-first-century Depression heroine (“I hear they need people up there”), Wendy (Michelle Williams) has only her dog Lucy and her car as company, but soon loses first the car, after it breaks down in Oregon, and then her dog. Unable to afford to fix the car, with no family or friends to help, Wendy is, for Reichardt, emblematic of so many Americans, especially in the film's post-Katrina era: barely holding on, and ready to slip through the cracks of a society with little safety net. Shot through with an unerring feel for the desperation, unease, and unrootedness of so many individuals, and also for the overlooked, flattened-out landscapes of small-town America, Wendy and Lucy is Italian neorealism filtered through the best of American 1970s cinema, yet is of-and for-today.