The Chantal Akerman is strong with this one. Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always slow burns through with the same kind of attention to minute, every day detail that made Akerman such a remarkable humanist filmmaker. Hittman's picture has a bit more narrative propulsion than Akerman tended to, with this film having the simple, A to B plotline of Autumn, a 17-year-old girl in Pennsylvania (Sidney Flanigan), needing to figure out a way to get an abortion, a difficult prospect…

Like a mixture of Antonioni, Varda, and Ashby, Frank Perry's The Swimmer is also a film entirely of its own design. It feels like such a rare treat after seeing almost 4,000 films to still see something and think that you've never seen anything like this before. And yet, despite those clear comparison points, there really is nothing out there like this. You can see its influence on plenty of what would come after, from Mad Men's Don Draper to…

Andrew Patterson’s low budget debut feature wears its influences on its sleeve. It uses a (unfortunate) framing device that tells us how bad this movie wants to be a Twilight Zone episode, and centers around a radio station named WOTW, a not so subtle reference to Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Those two reference points are basically the personality of The Vast of Night, a story of a quaint New Mexico town in the 1950s that…

A movie like no other, Repo Man has so much going on that it’s hard to make heads or tails of it. You can see where some of its influences come from (Mad Max) and surely where some of its influence went to (Tarantino), but Alex Cox’s directing debut is an animal entirely of its own design. What kind of audacity did this guy have to make his first ever feature something so unmistakably batshit! It doesn’t all come together,…