Rebuilding

If Josh O’Connor isn’t your new favourite actor it’s because you haven’t been paying attention. The actor — who played Prince Charles in The Crown — caps a busy year (The Mastermind; The History of Sound; Wake Up Dead Man) with a lovely understated portrait of a modern cowboy, Dusty, trying to put his life back together after losing his small ranch to a devastating wildfire. Like the laconic saddle tramps of black and white movies, Dusty believes that actions speak louder than words — but that doesn’t cut it with his ex wife (Meghann Fahy) or their young daughter Callie-Rose (Lily La Torre), and anyway, he doesn’t really know what to do with himself, stripped of the land that made him. As the title suggests, little by little and almost despite himself, this quiet man begins to figure out what’s going to sustain him going forward.

Loath as I am to label anything as “the movie people need right now,” it’s hard to think of Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding in any other terms at the moment. [It] accrues a lasting power from all of the impermanence that it collects along the way.

B+ David Ehrlich, IndieWire

In Walker-Silverman’s incarnation of the West, the endless possibility of the frontier has subtly dissipated into the finitude of American entropy.

Marshall Shaffer, Slant