Directed by:
Kelly ReichardtScreenplay:
Kelly ReichardtCinematography:
Christopher BlauveltComposer:
Jeff GraceCast:
Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Jared Harris, James Le Gros, Rene Auberjonois, John Getz, Ashlie Atkinson, Lily Gladstone, Matt McTighe (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
The expanses of the American Northwest take centre stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a woman (Michelle Williams) whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who forms a tenuous bond with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone), whose unguardedness and deep attachment to the land deliver an unexpected jolt of emotional immediacy. With unassuming craft, Reichardt captures the rhythms of daily life in small-town Montana through these fine-grained portraits of women trapped within the landscape’s wide-open spaces. (Criterion)
(more)Reviews (2)
I enjoy the slow telling of human stories in a minimalist form, especially in a village setting with snow-covered hills in the background. But there has to be something to tell about. Certain Women is composed of a few characters’ stories that would have ended up on the floor if the most interesting stories had been selected for filming. What drove the director to film these in particular remains a mystery to me. Jane Campion’s films in a similar vein, for example, are something else entirely both formalistically and in terms of content.
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A great Laura Dern, an uninteresting Michelle Williams, and an overly classic and increasingly masculine Kristen Stewart in a film that told itself that slow pacing is the direction of art films that have big ambitions. It’s too bad that not even one fate or one character were able to really engage me. I don't know why the film would be worth watching.
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