Jane Campion returns to the kind of mythic frontier landscape--pulsating with both freedom and menace--that she previously traversed in The Piano in order to plumb the masculine psyche in The Power of the Dog, set against the desolate plains of 1920s Montana and adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage's novel. After a sensitive widow and her enigmatic, fiercely loving son move in with her gentle new husband, a tense battle of wills plays out between...

In an instant, nurse Manuela loses the teenage son she raised on her own. Grief-stricken, she sets out to search for the boy's long-lost father in Barcelona, where she reawakens into a new maternal role, at the head of a surrogate family that includes a pregnant, HIV-positive nun; an illustrious star of the stage; and a transgender sex worker.