Review: Certain Women (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart

Over the course of six feature films, writer/director Kelly Reichardt has become a master of the small-scale story, narratives where the stakes are slight and deeply personal, driven by character more than plot. In Certain Women "plot" barely even registers; things happen, but what happens seems almost incidental. It's a film that's all about reaction, about how the women in the film respond to things they hadn't anticipated and how they're changed, or not changed, by them. It's an expertly told, intuitive film that tells three tenuously connected stories, each one anchored by a different actress. Most films struggle to find room for one good female character; this one features four and makes it look so easy that you're left wondering what the problem is with other movies.

Review: Wild (2014)

* * 1/2
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee
Starring: Reese Witherspoon

When the nominations for the biggest awards started being announced earlier this year, many of the articles that I read which focused on the general lack of diversity in Hollywood storytelling singled out Wild as the sort of great female-driven film that was being ignored and left behind by awarding groups whose membership comprised primarily of white men. Not having seen the film at that point, I didn't really know how valid that criticism was, and having now seen it, I'm somewhat perplexed. Wild is not a great movie, let alone a great movie about women. It's a fine movie and it features a fairly meaty leading role for a woman (in this case Reese Witherspoon, Oscar nominated for it), but it really never rises to the level of greatness as a film, and when it comes to its depiction of women it's never quite as progressive as it seems to want to take credit for, and actually embraces some fairly tired cultural ideas about women and their value within society.

Review: Inland Empire (2006)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Lynch
Starring: Laura Dern

There will come a time when everyone who watches a lot of movies will find themselves at the strange intersection where "quality" crosses with "dislike." I didn't like Inland Empire, David Lynch's spiritual successor to Mulholand Drive, but I know that it's good, perhaps even approaching genius. Although I find the aesthetic of the film off-putting (which is perhaps shallow, but film is about style and substance, look and feel), I recognize the complexity and delicate density of the narrative; and although I couldn't connect to the film as a whole on an emotional level, I found Laura Dern's performance alternately moving and mesmerizing - it is surely one of the best performances of the last ten years.