DIANE - Gareth Higgins

What lingers most after seeing Diane, a wise, sad, and beautiful film, and the best reason to go to the movies this week, is the roads. The title character, anchored in an immersive performance by Mary Kay Place, is always driving - from her house to the extended family who josh and complain and hold each other up, from there to the apartment where her son is failing to hide his problems, from there to the deathbed of a dear friend with whom she has a complicated history, from there to the church soup kitchen where she serves.

Diane, written and directed by the critic and festival curator Kent Jones, is about the process of aging and dying. It also takes in loneliness and community, the regret we feel for past actions, and what others may think of us, and how we cannot control the people we love, or save them from themselves; but it’s tied together by the roads. Diane has to drive everywhere, in the small towns and narrow freeways of Western Massachusetts. This may seem unremarkable, to most of us reading, because presumably most of us reading have to drive everywhere too. But I’m increasingly of the mind that life is not supposed to be lived this way. Humans are meant to live in villages most of the time, villages that don’t require vehicles to get around.

Read the rest of Gareth's review here.