Pictureland

Kelly Reichardt does not go easy on her characters.  Or her actors, for that matter.   Audiences, accustomed to much more in terms of plot, resolution and the blatantly obvious, might well count themselves among the ill-used after sitting through one of Ms. Reichardt's half dozen feature films.  All the same, the uncompromising Reichardt continues to solidify her place among the best American writers and directors.  The three main characters in her latest film, the certain women in question, must take their small satisfactions where they can find them.  For those of us watching the proceedings, there is 107 minutes of beauty and subtlety, the like of which one could hardly find elsewhere.  I could have watched this film had it extended hours beyond its appointed running time.     As she is wont to do,  Kelly Reichardt expanded upon short stories in creating her latest film, Certain Woman.  The stories in this case drawn fr...

Often pulsing with a score of ominous, insistent electronica, Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes  seems an echo from the fictional side of the story telling divide opposite documentaries of tragic economic chicanery like Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room , Client 9 and Inside Job.  All are films, whether apparent truth or fiction, concerning themselves with the deregulation of the financial industry that found its most devastating expression in the Global Financial Crisis (the swath of destruction vast enough that we can now grant it capital letters, like a world war) of 2008 and beyond. We're not given a specific date when we're dropped into the midst of the action, the great reversal, taking place in the U.S economy, but the setting is Orlando Florida (with unrecognizable suburbs of New Orleans standing in).  What's clear is that the economic crisis, initiated largely by a multitude of doomed mortgages, is quickly fanning and settling like a gangrenous rot.  ...