"Wind River" will blow you away.

Rating: 8/10 (6 November 2017)

At a deep and icy level, Wind River is about power. That dynamic cuts in multiple directions, across race and gender and class. But genre awareness can give us more than the dynamics baked into a movie's plot. Genre is a comparative ideaâ€”you have to see across movies in order to get a hold on a genre, which inevitably means that some details get flattened out. What movies do with our anxieties (why do cops kill?) changes from work to work, and from year to year. But if we are to learn anything new about our own hopes and fears for law enforcement, we have to find a new point of entry for movie-making: not cautionary pornography, or love letters to white feelings. There's something else going on here, and white masculinity is at its heart. The movie that can wring catharsis out of that will be a long time coming.