Certain Women
First screened in June 2016 / Most recently screened in September 2025
Director: Kelly Reichardt. Cast: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart, Jared Harris, Ashlie Atkinson, Guy Boyd, Edelen McWilliams, John Getz, Matt McTighe, Joshua T. Fonokalafi, James Le Gros, Sara Rodier, René Auberjonois, Marceline Hugot, Zena Dell Lowe, Gabriel Clark. Screenplay: Kelly Reichardt (based on selected stories from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy).

 Twitter Capsule: Fun to see Reichardt in a quiet but looser mode. Actors really respond, especially Gladstone and Stewart. It lingers.

VOR: ④  Simply telling women's or non-urban stories shouldn't feel bold. It does, though, which makes Certain Women valuable. New tone for Reichardt.


   
Photo © 2016 IFC Films/Film Science
I like the Dern/Harris segment and I'm ...fine with the Williams/Auberjonois, so I'd absolutely miss them if Kelly Reichardt hadn't made them. Plus, by following those two, the Gladstone/Stewart chapter gains in texture, social context, and cumulative emotional ambience. Even so, that segment by itself is clearly one of the best live-action short films of the decade, plus a remarkably astute and deeply felt transposition of the Maile Meloy story "B. Travis" on which it's based. Easy to imagine it winning the Oscar in that category if it could have contended.

"B. Travis" and Old Joy would also pair up gorgeously for a two-hour double feature, whether as a valentine to landscape and geography on screen, or a master class in storytelling via fragile intimation, or a cliché-free cross-section of the emotional lives of the precarious middle class, the working poor, and the free-floating unhoused. Or, most straightforwardly, as a diptych of Reichardt's best so far, despite some estimable runners-up in her uniquely affecting body of work. Grade: B+

(in June 2016: B)
Awards:
New York Film Critics Circle: Best Supporting Actress (Williams; also cited for Manchester by the Sea)
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Supporting Actress (Gladstone)
Boston Society of Film Critics: Best Supporting Actress (Gladstone)
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