Certain Women

The three sections of Kelly Reichardt’s new film—set in Montana and adapted from stories by Maile Meloy—are consistent in their restrained tone but divergent in their impact. The first two episodes offer little besides moderately engaging plots, but the third packs an overwhelming power of mood, observation, and longing. In the first, Laura Dern plays Laura, a lawyer whose affair with a married man named Ryan (James Le Gros) is ending just as a client (Jared Harris), a disabled construction worker, comes unhinged. In the second, Ryan and his wife, Gina (Michelle Williams), who is also his boss, visit an elderly acquaintance, Albert (René Auberjonois), to buy stone for their country house. The third story features Lily Gladstone as Jamie, a young caretaker at a horse farm who drops in on an adult-education class and strikes up a tense and tenuous friendship with the teacher, a young lawyer named Beth (Kristen Stewart). Here, Reichardt infuses slender details with breathtaking emotion. The fervent attention to light and movement—as in a scene of a quietly frenzied nocturnal pursuit—seems to expand cinematic time and fill it with inner life. (MOMA, Sept. 17, and streaming)