Robb Moss’s The Bend in the River Draws Critical Acclaim

Robb Moss’s latest documentary, The Bend in the River, has received widespread critical attention for its intimate portrait of friendship, memory, and aging. The film completes Moss’s decades-spanning documentary trilogy following a group of longtime friends first introduced in his 1978 short Riverdogs and revisited in The Same River Twice (2003).

Nearly 25 years after The Same River Twice, Moss reunites with his longtime friends for another journey down the Colorado River. Through contemporary footage interwoven with material from the earlier films, The Bend in the River explores how relationships, identities, and lives evolve over decades while enduring friendships remain a constant.

In The New York Times, Alissa Wilkinson praised the film in a review titled “Scenes of Aging Friends Add Up to Something Profound,” highlighting Moss’s ability to find emotional depth in the ordinary experiences of people growing older.

A particularly powerful aspect of the film is Moss’s relationship with his friend Jim, whose unconventional life stands in contrast to the more traditional paths taken by the other members of the group. Rather than presenting Jim’s choices as a cautionary tale, Moss approaches his life with concern, empathy, and respect, reflecting the trust developed through decades of friendship and filmmaking.

Across the critical response, The Bend in the River emerges as more than a film about aging. It is also an exploration of what it means to maintain friendships over a lifetime and how filmmaking can preserve moments that might otherwise be forgotten. 

The film’s reception also underscores the distinctive achievement of Moss’s three-film project. Taken together, the trilogy offers a rare record of people growing older alongside one another, allowing audiences to reflect on their own friendships, memories, and experiences of change.

As Moss says of the trilogy’s underlying principle: “Stay friends with your friends. For all kinds of reasons you can’t anticipate.”

Selected Reviews and Features

• The New Yorker — “Robb Moss Is Still Going with the Flow”
• The New York Times — “Scenes of Aging Friends Add Up to Something Profound,” by Alissa Wilkinson
• Rolling Stone — “‘We Forget — But the Camera Remembers’: How a Hippie River Trip Gave Birth to a Hit Doc Series,” by David Fear

The Bend in the River continues Robb Moss’s longstanding exploration of friendship, memory, and the passage of time through documentary filmmaking.