Dead of Winter

After her husband’s death, widow Barb sets out to fulfil his last request to have his ashes scattered in Lake Hilda in northern Minnesota. When Barb reaches the lake, she sees Leah, a young woman with her hands bound trying to escape from her abductor. ….

Director Brian Kirk gives Emma Thompson an inspired opportunity to play a completely different kind of role. You’ve never seen her like this, grungy in working overalls grappling over a rifle in the middle of a frozen lake. But all the craft and presence you’d expect from the two-time Oscar winner are on display, as always. She’s often alone on screen and much of the performance is wordless, but because she’s Emma Thompson, she always holds our attention with warmth and wisdom. Roger Ebert

In the wake of her father’s sudden death in 2007, the English academic Helen Macdonald turned to training a goshawk, attempting to stave off depression by subsuming her grief in a relationship with a bird of prey—not just any bird but one considered notoriously difficult to train, even for trained falconers. But the goshawk’s fierce, unpredictable nature spoke to something wild in Macdonald’s own temperament, to her impulsive and perhaps self-destructive desire to withdraw from civilization, taking solace in the natural world.
Claire Foy, best known for playing a young Queen Elizabeth in the “The Crown,” is heartbreaking in this adaptation’s main role: steely and stoic in the stiff-upper-lip tradition yet thoroughly conscious of her sorrow, which smarts beneath all the poised expressions like the inner wound it is. Ebert