Powerful and moving film adaptation of 3 short stories: Certain Women

Kelly Reichardt's smart, introspective, and moving film Certain Women (2016) is a series of three short narratives about female protagonists (played really well in turn by Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart) linked only by their shared setting (contemporary South Central Montana), time, and mood. This is not a series of interlocked narratives a la, for ex., Crash, but somewhat of an anthology piece: cf Altman's film based on Raymond Carver stories - and unsurprisingly Certain Women is based on a set of short stories by Maile Meloy (I've read some of her stories in the NYer though I don't remember those adapted for this movie). I've seen some though not all of KR's previous films - written and directed by - and you can see here the continuity of interest, a focus on young women (though Dern's role here is of a more mature woman), lonely, generally in sparsely populated Western settings, trying to get by and to come to terms with who they are in life, often using an "open" ending rather than a climactic, dramatic conclusion, with the women maybe at a wiser point than at the outset but still with decisions, pain, and life before them. (If any filmmaker could tackle Chekhov, I think KR could do great adaptations of a series of his stories.) This is not the movie for those who want high drama and lots of action, but for those moved by introspection, mood, ambiguity, and sense of place (he captures the look and feel of small Western cities really well, with the ever-present whistle of passing freights, esp in the first of the 3 narratives) - in other words, qualities salient in serious literature - this film adds to KR's formidable body of work and is well worth your watching.