‘Showing Up’ Review: A Stressed Artist Befriends a Wounded Pigeon in Kelly Reichardt’s Feather-Light Comedy

First Cow” may not have been anywhere near as soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film about desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul.

Or, a fowl, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up,” who reluctantly finds herself nursing an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite career.The good news is that nobody gets buried with their best friend or has to leave them behind; this isn’t the kind of movie in which people die so much as one where everyone wears overalls and André Benjamin plays the patient kiln master at an Oregon arts college.

The bad news is

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