Frozen River

            

"So real... It doesn't look like a movie, doesn't feel like a movie, it's a wonderful depiction of poverty in America that took my breath away... Somewhere around the last hour it put my heart in a vice and proceeded to twist that vice until the last frame. And all of a sudden this completely naturalistic movie was one of the most exciting thrillers I'm going to see this year... " -- Quentin Tarantino, Sundance 2008 Awards Ceremony

"Reed Morano, the cinematographer, has a subtle sense of light. Every tone, from the bright to the virtually black, is handily in [her] chromatic scale. Hunt has had Morano's help in keeping every shot either the rightly inevitable one for that moment or a variation of the expected that freshens -- sometimes beautifies -- the moment." -- The New Republic

"...cinematographer Reed Morano render[s] the trips across the river in the freezing cold with excruciating tension, and these passages form the heart of the film." -- Hollywood Reporter

"Cinematographer Reed Morano delivers sterling work for a film of any level, capturing the frigid environs with an almost poetic melancholy." -- Box Office

"[Director Courtney] Hunt and cinematographer Reed Dawson Morano do justice to the land's clear poverty as well at its wintry beauty... Frozen River linger[s] on a break in the trees, the sloping entry to the St. Lawrence that Ray and Lila use to smuggle their human cargo. Mohawk Territory is nearby and it's as if there are two separate worlds but that icy doorway becomes the film's symbol of opportunity as well as understandable defeat." -- indieWIRE

"...Cinematographer Reed Morano creates an unostentatiously virtuosic lighting effect: It's as if the women were walking across the surface of the moon." -- The House Next Door

"Movies about women get far fewer Oscar nominations than movies about men, and movies about working-class people get fewer still. True to Academy Award form, Frozen River got little notice from the Oscar nominators, except for Melissa Leo's performance and Hunt's screenplay... I would have chosen director of photography Reed Morano's capture of the bleak junkyard-cluttered winter landscape for the cinematography award." -- indypendent.org

Reed Morano's work on Frozen River was the subject of an article in the August 2008 issue of American Cinematographer magazine.

Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa

         

"[Directors] the Stulbergs, whose film's stunning look is a combination of good cinematography and a majestic New Mexican landscape, achieved marvelous access to what has to be a very closed and insular community... The various characters come to vivid life as crises large, small and unresolved are explored..." -- Variety

"A beautifully shot trip into an outsider community that is hard to forget." -- Agnes Varnum, Doc It Out

"Off the Grid looks like an eerie mix between Lord of the Flies and Kid Nation." -- BuzzFeed.com

"The film looks beautiful. . . I was moved to tears." -- Ingrid Kopp, Shooting People