Wendy and Lucy

Set amid the leafy splendour of America's Pacific North West, Wendy and Lucy is the latest offering from writer/director Kelly Reichardt, who in 2006 gave us the magnificent Old Joy. And once again she presents a movie that is brief and sweet and spare.

Wendy (a fantastic Michelle Williams) is on her way up to Alaska, meandering her way through Oregon and Washington. The bad luck that she encounters in a nondescript town en route (her car breaking down, her arrest for shoplifting and losing her dog, Lucy) unexpectedly makes for a simple and subtle rumination on the hard times of the nation.

The mood here, modest and muted, suits the restrained air of these times, while Wendy - a woman who counts her pennies and keeps her meagre accounts in a small notebook - harbours ambitions that stretch no further than working in a fish cannery in Ketchikan. She's a strange, solitary figure; adrift from her family, rumbling along in her aged Honda, the one constant warmth in her life is her dog, Lucy - and it makes for the most convincing on-screen friendship.

This is a perfect film in many ways that, more than anything, serves to remind us of the quite exceptional talents not only of Reichardt, but of Williams as well. ·