Wanda (Blu-ray)

THE CRITERION COLLECTION

With her first and only film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a ground-breaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen.

Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme.

A difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.