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At the beginning of \u201cThe Bend in the River,\u201d a simple title card lays out director Robb Moss<\/a>\u2018 premise for anyone unfamiliar with his prior films. \u201cWe used to be river guides,\u201d it reads. \u201cFor many years, my friends and I lived an unscheduled, communal, outdoor life.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s an accurate statement, even if it inadequately describes the amount of genitals on display in the film<\/a>\u2018s opening scenes. Moss has been filming the same group of five friends on and off for half a century, beginning with the 1978 film \u201cRiverdogs,\u201d which followed the free spirits as they took a nude trip down the Colorado River. The scenes radiate the joy of being young, attractive, and filled with infinite free time and minimal distractions except the open sky above you. Then in 2003, he caught up with everyone again in \u201cThe Same River Twice,\u201d which saw how middle age, with all of its marriages, divorces, political campaigns, and cancer diagnoses, was treating the former hippies.<\/p>\n With his latest film, \u201cThe Bend in the River,\u201d Moss is once again setting sail on those same metaphorical waters. His friends are now in their early seventies, and while many of them are full of energy and have the same youthful sparkle in their eyes, they all seem to be aware that they\u2019re telling a story that\u2019s already ended. If \u201cRiverdogs\u201d was about the infinite possibility of having your whole life ahead of you and \u201cThe Same River Twice\u201d was about middle age\u2019s difficult choices, \u201cThe Bend in the River\u201d is about what life looks like when all of your choices have already been made.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say that it\u2019s tragic. Moss\u2019 camera is deeply nonjudgemental towards the passage of time. The filmmaker and his subjects are lifelong environmentalists, and the film treats human aging and all of its mundanities with the same beauty and dignity that you might find in a nature documentary. But while it never condemns or mocks its subjects for being grayer and slower, it also has little interest in \u201cage is just a number\u201d style erasure of our inevitable physical declines. He makes no attempt to hide that everyone does less than they used to and have less to look forward to, but the stories their faces tell are far more interesting than their skinny dipping sequences from 1978. <\/p>\n While Moss clearly has fun with cuts that juxtapose their youthful hijinks with adults saying \u201cI wonder if anybody ever uses up a box of business cards. Because it\u2019s so economical to print 10,000\u201d in their home offices, reducing the film to simply \u201chippies getting old\u201d fails to capture its brilliance. The five subjects, and the different paths that life takes them down, offers a richly nuanced portrait of aging that contradicts many of the two-dimensional narratives about what it means to live a human life. <\/p>\n Moss certainly can\u2019t take credit for the realization that many of us do wild things in our youth before mellowing with age and embracing conventional parts of life that we swore we\u2019d always avoid. But conversations about hippies growing up to be corporate accountants often insist that once chapter of life has to be positive and the other has to be negative \u2014 they either \u201csell out\u201d and abandon their values, or they \u201cgrow up\u201d and realize that they were being childish idiots. But \u201cThe Bend in the River\u201d looks past such binary thinking and elegantly presents both seasons as something worthwhile. <\/p>\n The film also illustrates how nature matters as much as nurture when it comes to our own aging processes. While societal pressures and adult realities certainly play a role in leading us to realize that we can\u2019t operate naked river tours forever, Moss shows how his friends are still more or less themselves after seven decades on earth. Some of them still live in cabins and grow their own food and others spend their days staring at Microsoft Office screens, but versions of the spontaneous hippie archetype still live on within each of them.<\/p>\n Even if you haven\u2019t seen the prior films in the trilogy, \u201cThe Bend in the River\u201d is worth seeking out as an anthropological exercise. There\u2019s enough footage from the prior films to get you up to speed quickly, and none of the individual story arcs matter nearly as much as the larger sense that each season of human life is worthy of its own naturalistic exploration. <\/p>\n Taken together, the three films in the \u201cRiver\u201d trilogy represent a large portion of Moss and his friends\u2019 life\u2019s work. Everyone seems acutely aware of this fact, as they both reflect on how the prior films briefly turned them into the minorest of celebrities and joke about a fourth installment in 20 years that they know they might not live long enough to make. But even if this is the last we ever see of the onetime river guides, it\u2019s clear that their lives amounted to a story that\u2019s worth telling and watching.<\/p>\n Grade: B+<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bend in the River\u201d is now playing at Film Forum in New York City. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the beginning of \u201cThe Bend in the River,\u201d a simple title card lays out director Robb Moss\u2018…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,2695,206,900,345138],"class_list":["post-813675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-robb-moss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"'Lanterns,'](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lanterns-release-date-HBO-series-Green-Lantern-Kyle-Chandler.jpg\")
<\/a> ![\"TORONTO,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2254509227.jpg\")
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