This Week at the Movies

Just a few weeks ago, I was bemoaning the faux feminism being sold by the team behind “Sucker Punch,” a big budget action film during which scantily clad teenage girls are constantly under threat of being physically or sexually assaulted. I didn’t buy that the filmmakers were aiming for female empowerment with the picture.

This weekend saw the release of two more films in which young women are in danger from the first flickering image on the screen. And yet, they are both well worth recommending – one a stylish and violent take on the spy film and the other a revisionist western. It’s all a matter of tone.

Joe Wright’s “Hanna” is a tense action movie with a preposterous premise. In some semi-arctic locale, a rogue spy (Eric Bana) has raised his 16-year-old daughter, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), to be an assassin. Hot on their trail is a ruthless agent played by Cate Blanchett and a group of German mercenaries who dress as if they were members of a British New Wave band from the 1980s.

I won’t go into explaining why Bana and Hanna are being sought or why Blanchett’s agent is so intent on hunting them down.

Hanna is brought in for questioning, kills an agent and makes a run for it. Much of the film is a cat and mouse game as the girl flees from her trackers and hides out with a vacationing British family. There are some genuine moments as the girl makes a short-lived attempt at family life with the traveling clan.

The film, which boasts a fairly ludicrous premise and even throws in a third act twist involving DNA testing, places its emphasis strongly on style and pacing, which is why the picture works. “Hanna” is a tense, fast paced thriller and, I’d argue, fantasy.

On the other end of the spectrum, but also featuring women in peril, is Kelly Reichardt’s stripped down western, “Meek’s Cutoff.”

The picture opens with a title card that alerts us that the story is set on the Oregon Trail in 1845. This is the film’s sole attempt at setting the scene.

Three families have hired Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a boastful man of questionable merit, as a guide over the Cascade Mountains. But the wagon train soon becomes lost and quickly runs low on water.

Mutiny seems inevitable, especially after the group stumbles upon a lone Native American man in the middle of the desert. Half of the group, led by Will Patton and his wife, Emily (Michelle Williams), believes the man could be their sole means of survival. Meek, on the other hand, immediately places the man in shackles and votes to execute him.

It is at this point that Emily, the most sensible among the seven travelers, takes the lead as the film’s moral compass. Throughout the movie, the group’s men hold nearly indecipherable conversations in low tones as their wives (Williams, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan) stand off in the distance, attempting to overhear what is being said.

By the time the film has reached its pivotal point, Emily has not only entered into a negotiating process with the men, but is also the only character to have fired a weapon.

Reichardt’s previous films include “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy,” which also featured Williams as the lead. Both pictures were also set in Oregon and follow characters who become lost in their surroundings. With “Meek’s Cutoff,” the director has taken her favored storyline and used it to craft an enigmatic film that joins The Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” as part of a new crop of westerns that explore feminist themes.