Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy, a Kelly Reichardt film made on a budget almost as penny-wise as its cash-strapped protagonist, follows a girl and her dog in a worse-for-wear '88 Honda Accord as they trek from heartland Indiana through the Pacific Northwest for the pole star of Alaska. It's not a lark or a Kerouac road trip, but more akin to the westward push of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Only Wendy, played with unaffected grace by Michelle Williams, faces necessity as an individual with no supporting family or memory of community, traveling into the unknown aloneexcept for her yellow retriever Lucy. Filmed a year before the first alarms were sounded over the Great Recession, this drama’s vision of hobo campfires in the woods and a new generation of migrants riding freight cars in search of work seems strangely prescient.