PERSONAL VELOCITY

Three very different but similarly conflicted women reach a turning point in their lives.


CAST: Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk, Ron Leibman, Tim Guinee

DIRECTOR: Rebecca Miller

"Rebecca Miller, adapting a trio of short stories from her 2001 collection, creates portraits of three highly distinct women, and virtually every second we spend with them tingles with discovery... Kyra Sedgwick has finally found the perfect role for her hard, squinty beauty...Just when Parker Posey's indie It Girl status was starting to look like a relic of the '90s, she comes through with the richest performance of her career...Fairuza Balk, that neurotic hellion, is memorable as a tormented punkette whose encounter with a boy in even more hideous pain than she cleanses her of nihilism...All three of the women in 'Personal Velocity' lunge for, and find, the essential in life. As a filmmaker, so does Rebecca Miller." --Owen Gleiberman, Entertaiment Weekly

"Ignore the verbose narration and the precious dialogue. The immediacy of director Rebecca Miller's visual style and the lovely performances make this worth watching." --Bilge Ebiri, New York

"This is one of the finest pictures of the year because Ms. Miller's knowledge of her characters is mirrored by the secure palette of Ms. Kuras's camera work...Each of these self-contained stories puts the protagonist at a crisis in her life and develops the drama in a free-floating manner...Ms. Miller shifts tone from story to story with unhurried aplomb; it's as if she takes a deep breath before beginning each new section...Even when the movie is over, the psychological physics of 'Personal Velocity" will remain in your head." --Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

"One of the gutsiest images I've seen in a movie this year is the sight of Delia sobbing alone in the middle of the night, away from her sleeping children and missing the man who had once bloodied her face. That isn't what women are supposed to do when they leave, either through the front door or out the back. Miller's strength in her stories and in the film is in her ability to push past ideology and get right down to the nitty-gritty of desire…a movie that at its best doesn't just make the most out of its characters' flaws but insists on the virtue of imperfection -- how different from the vacuumed ideal that fills most of our screens! " --Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times

"What it offers audiences is all the authenticity and emotional honesty of second-rate science-fiction...'Personal Velocity' makes its agenda evident from the opening credit sequence: three girls on swings, backed by melancholic music and framed by the sense that life, pre-men, is idyllic and lost. How it gets that way unfolds in three distinctly different women...rather than inhabit these women, Miller and her cast give you the feeling they're just visiting. Which is good. Because you couldn't want to live here." --John Anderson, Newsday

"Rebecca Miller's intelligent troika of vignettes about female empowerment, 'Personal Velocity,' is a lesson in how to wring potency from fairly conventional situations and wrest pure entertainment from tightly drawn purse strings...Succinct yet detailed storytelling, evocative cinematography (by Ellen Kuras) and arresting central performances add up to a trio of engaging character portraits." --Megan Turner, The New York Post

"There's a dingy dread and despair to the tales, despite their heroines discovering the grit to move from inertia to action. The women are dragged through the messes and dark recesses of memory and mistakes, finally earning a kind of transcendence and right to claim their due…The actors navigate tough characters through emotional mayhem with such intense determination it's a shame they're undercut by the intrusive voice-over." --Paula Nechak, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer