PERSONAL VELOCITY

The writer-director Rebecca Miller creates portraits of three highly distinct women, and virtually every second we spend with them tingles with discovery. By the end of each story, you feel as if you know the heroine’s moods, her wiles, her past, her present, and the change she’s in the midst of making without knowing it — in short, her entire life up to that moment. The actresses, all of them inspired, include Kyra Sedgwick, Fairuza Balk, and Parker Posey, who comes through with the richest performance of her career, using her bubbly charm to tap the secret spirit of a Manhattan cookbook editor who is newly alchemized by the discovery of ambition.