I gave Dallas Buyers Club a positive review, a B+, but I think I overrated it. Director Jean-Marc Vallée lacks voice, style, and vision. Or at least he did in that movie, and Club showed he had little sense for movies and not much more for the craft of moviemaking. I noted in my review that he relies on cheap tricks and heavyweight performances—neither of which were deserving of the statues they brought home (Leo is sublime in Wolf, and he should have won). They move you, but only in the kind of way Alex was moved by the startling images in A Clockwork Orange. Dallas Buyers was manipulative to a fault, but, worse than that, nothing is more insulting to a film or to the people who made it than to call it ordinary, regular, or by the book. These are words that describe Dallas Buyers perfectly, poisonous remarks for a movie ironically all about finding an antidote. So as I walked into the screening for his new movie, Wild, it was with hesitance. To my surprise, I left smiling.

Adapted from best-selling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, a book that documents a woman named Cheryl Strayed fleeing to the wildness in 1994 and the spiritual insights she gleaned along the way. Acting as an answer to the oft-asked what if, “I could run away,” grief and mistakes sent Cheryl on a daunting 1,100 mile hike that pushes her through dense forests and frozen mountains. Wild begins with the biographical center figure, played and produced by Reese Witherspoon, sitting atop a rocky hillside stoop with a broken big toe nail, in pain. It takes seconds before her toe becomes a mental mirror, and my feet squirmed imagining the pain. Vallée’s direction has improved. He’s learned to work with his actors instead of treating them like exhibitions that he directs from backstage. He frames them, and the beautiful world they travel through, with care. The episodic structure juxtaposes a tense encounter with a middle-aged cowboy with creep hunters Cheryl encounters later on; it’s a trick the story employs often, and by the film’s end, single scenes have multiple meanings they didn’t as you watched them. Vallée has found his talent as a storyteller, and it shows. Wild has flaws, but it’s largely an absorbing experience that, at times, cuts deep.

In an effort to advance women’s presence in film, Reese Witherspoon bought two properties she intended to star in: Wild and Gone Girl. Both came from books, and both have made a feminist splash with readers and critics alike. Powerful, autonomous women in popular storytelling are rare, and it’s impossible to watch either without seeing them as a call for change. Fincher didn’t want Witherspoon for Amazing Amy—a role that wisely went to Rosamund Pike—and it’s just as well, since she owns this part. Witherspoon isn’t the pretty in pink damsel we’ve seen her play in so many movies. She’s not afraid to curse, and, unlike most women in film, she doesn’t treat her flaws like secrets to be hidden with emotional makeup and to be distracted from with sex. For better and worse, she is who she is, and wrestles with an identity largely independent from men. Wild is one of the only movies this year to pass the Bechdel test, and it’s refreshing.