My Brilliant Career

It's hard to imagine a film filled with more quiet integrity, intelligent passion, realistic drama and genuine entertainment than Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career.

This is a modest, clear sighted film, and it profits considerably from a lack of the bravura landscape photography that most directors would have used to puff up a movie set in Australia.

This Australian film is a charming look at 19th-century rural days in general and the stirrings of self-realization and feminine liberation in the persona of a headstrong young girl who wants to go her own way.

It’s funny that Armstrong’s one big Hollywood hit was her 1994 adaptation of Little Women, because she’d already made one where Jo doesn’t have to marry Mr. Baher.