Metacritic reviews

If one were to watch this jagged, restless movie with no knowledge of who made it, guessing that it sprung from the same mind that created "Old Joy" or "Meek’s Cutoff" would be impossible. Intuiting that this gifted novice filmmaker would go on to bigger and better things, however, would be child’s play.

At every turn, Reichardt confounds predictability, confronting us with the awful banality of many people's everyday lives rather than providing her characters with an escape from it. Yet Reichardt is so agile, ingenious and funny that she can make a lively, entertaining movie about how life isn't like the movies.

Reichardt pays clear homage to Breathless and Badlands, but her movie, the title of which is a local name for the Everglades, operates in its own ecosystem, teeming with the droll, shrewd observations about downwardly mobile life explored more solemnly in Reichardt's next two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.

Reichardt's satire is directed just as devastatingly at present-day mindlessness and its inability to reinvent pop myth as against the cliches people inhabit as a substitute for living. And yet there's an affection for the cultural and spiritual meltdown her film's world embraces. River of Grass is incisive and funny. What's even rarer, it's simultaneously subversive and compassionate. Reichardt is a filmmaker to watch. [15 Dec 1995, p.70]

Kelly Reichardt's film is a wry, appealingly raggedy look at the impossibility of conjuring up excitement from boredom.

Highly original and filmed with perfect assurance, River of Grass is one of the finest independent films of recent years.

More than "Natural Born Killers," it's a real deconstruction of the whole love-on-the-run crime genre: drab, grim but effective.

It is wonderful at conveying a sense of suffocating ennui. Too wonderful, since the story is so sketchily told and the dialogue is so fragmentary that it doesn't quite cohere. The characters remain hazy ciphers in the torpid atmosphere of a place you'll never want to visit.

Unfortuately, the film emerges more as a listless travelogue than as a philosophical trek. Stylized in the manner of "Badlands" with a flat voice-over from the film's dullard female lead, River of Grass is a meandering and ultimately uninvolving film. [26 Jan 1994]

River of Grass works much better as a jokey , theoretical piece of genre revisionism than as a real movie.