Scrolling through the Criterion Collection for a film to watch while indoor cycling, I came upon Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women as if for the first time. I say “as if” because while the first two episodes in this interrelated 3-part + coda film seemed entirely new to me, I had already seen the third part, featuring Kristen Stewart in her characteristic high surly mode and a breath-of-fresh-air newcomer, Lily Gladstone, playing against her, silently exuding affection that Stewart’s character refuses, or fails, either to notice or acknowledge. Those new to Reichardt’s films, all but one of them set in the Pacific Northwest, will notice that only Gladstone’s unnamed character (who mainly tends horses and other livestock for a living) affects the virtually mute but grounded, embodied style Reichardt favors, while the other three A-list actors—played successively by Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, and Stewart—are voluble in variably impatient, cutting or self-reflexive ways in their assigned roles as educated professionals (Dern and Stewart play lawyers, Williams appears to be a successful businesswoman or entrepreneur).

As the list of featured actors indicate, Reichardt is very much a woman-centered director, who, when she chooses to focus mainly on men (as she does in First Cow and Old Joy), presents them either as emotionally clueless or as sympathetically striving to be something different and better. In Certain Women, two of the men—as successively embodied by James LeGros, Jared Harris, and LeGros again—represent lazy, irresponsible cheats (LeGros) and pathetic washouts (Harris), respectively, with Rene Auberjonois turning in a lovely performance as a dignified old man suffering from on-and-off-again dementia. Though this may seem like a set-up to expect more of the same from a woman-centered director—which is what most of the film’s admiring reviewers seem to think—Reichardt is, in my opinion, doing something very different with her three female leads, often subjecting their self-involvement and social indifference to direct (Dern’s Laura, Stewart’s Elizabeth) or implied (Williams’s Gina) criticism.

The film starts with Dern’s Laura in a hotel room after an afternoon tryst with Gina’s husband, Ryan (LeGros), and arriving unapologetically late for an appointment with Jared Harris’s Fuller, who continues to contest a failed workman’s compensation appeal long after it’s been decided. Fuller, seemingly, will only accept this decision after a male lawyer tells him the same thing Laura has been telling him for months, which is how Laura (but maybe not how Reichardt) reads his recalcitrance. (Fuller will, after all, next appear holding a sympathetic Native American hostage at the point of a rifle.) Indeed, Reichardt’s manner of presenting this material makes the scattershot Lauraseem the last advocate a client of any gender would choose to aggressively advance one’s case. In addition to sleeping with another woman’s loutish husband, Laura seems completely checked out as a lawyer, only becoming the least bit sympathetic when she visits Fuller in prison after his semi-comedic effort at hostage-taking ends in failure.

Michelle William’s Gina is the betrayed wife of the irresponsible husband LeGros plays, who is clearly the man’s intellectual superior as well as the person who pays the bills. She jogs, spars with her insufferable daughter, and takes the lead in negotiating the surrender of a truckload of building stones from Albert, the old man played by Auberjonois. Reichardt brilliantly shows how the variably caustic and business-like Gina tries to ingratiate herself with Albert by engaging him with the girlish charm and graciousness she expects men to defer to. It’s not clear whether Albert falls for her performance—his generosity in surrendering the stones seems at once natural and neighborly—but it’s clear (to me at least) that Gina has negotiated in a decidedly transactional manner, her self-interest trumping anything approaching a genuinely personal concern.

Kristen Stewart’s performance as Elizabeth Travis, a lawyer who has unaccountably agreed to teach a night class in education law to a small group of downbeat teachers four hours from her home, seems designed as a study in oblivious self-involvement. Incurious about why a reserved tender of horses would choose to sit in on a class that Elizabeth never tries to make the least bit interesting or why she would offer to accompany Elizabeth to a diner where she never orders anything, much less why after three classes the woman offers Elizabeth a ride on her horse to the diner, Elizabeth exudes nothing but a sense of put-upon complaint and self-importance. Indeed, she never even asks what the infatuated young woman’s name is, though Reichardt makes it clear that she is the only character in this film worthy of our respect, sympathy, and admiration–which is what makes Certain Women an intriguing companion piece to Women Talking,Sarah Polley’s recent adaptation of a novel by Miriam Toews.

The Canadian born Polley has been acting since she was 6-years old and directing features since 2006 when she was 27, that first feature being the remarkably moving Away from Her. The all-round excellence of Women Talking is enhanced even more by the depth of Polley’s commitment to tell this particular story in this particular way: one that follows Toews’s lead in having a representative group of about 14 Mennonite women and girls exhaustively debate their options—whether to stay; whether to stay and fight; whether to leave—before arriving at a collective decision to abandon their Mennonite colony to the men left behind.

Toews’s novel is based on events that occurred between 2005-2009 at Manitoba, one of 90 Mennonite colonies in Bolivia, and on the discovery that 151women and girls were repeatedly raped after being sprayed with a veterinary sedative used to subdue bulls. After their male bishop brought these acts to the attention of the Bolivian authorities, eight Mennonite men were eventually convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison: a result that did not please others in the Manitoba colony who, with the support of other colonies, have been continuously calling for their release. Following Toews’s lead, Polley’s film exploits this tension to emphasize the urgency of the women to come to a decision, literally overnight, while all but one of the men of the colony are away, petitioning for the release of the alleged rapists.

This is one of the many places where Polley’s film—like Toews’s novel—substantially diverges from the facts of the case and does so to invest agency in women who, perhaps, could not even dream of taking the kind of action their fictional avatars would take. Polley makes the leap her talking women take more extreme by having her uniformly illiterate characters—whose only exposure to story and argument would likely come from hearing Scripture and singing hymns–occasionally speak as if they are interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue. As we witness the articulateness and eloquence with which Polley’s women frame and make their arguments, we are presumably meant to marvel at how naturally such grace and conviction can rise from wellsprings formerly left untapped. And we do marvel, not least because in the transition from fact to fiction, Polley has had the good sense to cast some of the very best contemporary actors—whose numbers include Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, and Frances McDormand—to channel the mix of sadness and rage, ambivalence and confusion, piety and fear that ultimately resolves into a consensual decision to leave the only life they’ve known.

This decision to leave, like the debate that leads to it, effects a crucial speculative departure from the actual events of 2009, while at the same time remaining faithful to our own contemporary moment, where women around the globe—from Iran and Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan and the Haredi precincts of Israel, Crown Heights, and Rockland County—remain in chains forged by the minds of overbearing men. The difference, in the end, between Certain Women and Women Talking involves the difference between Reichardt’s granular depiction of privileged Western women exercising their agency at the expense of, instead of in the interest of others, and Polley’s aspirational depiction of oppressed women learning that agency is gained by exercising the freedom to speak to, with, and for others and developing the courage to act together on behalf of a collective good. Where these women go and what becomes of them is, of course, pure speculation, but I’ll take Polley’s lead in imagining that they are all around us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, along with Reichardt’s suggestion that certain kinds of women are just as likely to be found on a horse farm as in a law office.