Kelly Reichardt · 2010 · overland

Kelly Reichardt's 2010 western, from the real Oregon Trail disaster of 1845. Three families hire the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over a short cut he claims to know. Two weeks becomes five, the water runs out, and the film stays with the women - shot in the square Academy ratio, so the horizon is always closing in.

1. 1
   Vale

   Where the cutoff leaves the Oregon Trail. Meek talks a party off the known road and onto a route he says will save weeks - and in the real event some two hundred people went with him and a great many did not arrive.

2. 2
   The Malheur

   West up the Malheur, and the film's method is set in the first minutes: fording a river in real time, a grandfather clock carried across on a shoulder, the labour shown at the speed it actually took.

3. 3
   The Harney Basin

   Into the alkali country where the water is undrinkable and the guide's confidence starts to sound like bluff - and the men hold their councils out of earshot while the women watch from the wagons and work out what is happening.

4. 4
   Wagontire

   Lost in the high desert with the barrels empty. A Cayuse man is captured, and the party's survival comes down to whether they trust the guide who brought them here or the prisoner they cannot understand.

5. 5
   The Crooked River

   The film ends without telling you: a lone tree, a choice made and not explained, and the wagons going on into country that has already been indifferent to them for a hundred minutes.

6. 6
   The Dalles

   Where the cutoff was supposed to come out, and where the survivors of 1845 eventually did - starving, months late, having buried their dead in a desert the route was named after ever afterwards.