JANET PLANET

It’s the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods. As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends. Set in 1991 rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize­–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that moves at a different, lost pace of life, and which perceives heartbreak just as Lacy is beginning to grasp the world and her place in it. Baker has created a film about a mother and daughter quite unlike any other, heightening the viewer’s senses and expressing oceans of feeling with the smallest gestures. Nicholson and Ziegler perform their roles with an inspiring lack of sentimentality, and the wondrous supporting cast includes Elias Koteas, Sophie Okonedo, and Will Patton.