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Critics reviews

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

Ana Lily Amirpour United States, 2014
The Girl's unflinching eye-contact and commanding chador-clad physical presence is unwavering. Her unnerving demeanour is only tempered by the fact that she is in situations that usually demand that women make themselves as invisible as possible. Hers is an often comic and sometimes violent act of taking back the night, set to a killer soundtrack. A slow-motion setpiece built around White Lies' "Death" is a memorable highlight.
August 10, 2015
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To be fair to Amirpour, she's not gunning for straight storytelling and has deliberately fashioned a film that aims to play with genre ideas. The critical problem is there is no energy in the playing. Scenes are slow to the point of stasis. The only pulse comes from satisfying, eclectic music selections: haunting eastern strings, electronica and Sergio Leone-style chorals.
May 22, 2015
Amirpour's film has the crispness and finesse of a music video. Every gesture is choreographed, every frame is arresting, every sound edit perfectly placed. When it works, this considered pace is arresting, but what works in moments of intensity can pall across the narrative arc.
May 22, 2015
Easily the most gruesome scene is the one of his dispatch, a vividly shot and cut rhapsody in bleccch. It's the dramatic zenith of a film that sometimes feels intimidatingly cool, and too self-consciously downbeat. Your first guess is that Amirpour never met a Jim Jarmusch film she didn't like, but given that she's denied this in interviews, it's must be more a case of accidentally twinned stylebooks: the deadpan glaze never comes off.
May 21, 2015
Amirpour develops a unique perspective on the volatility of relationships. Much of the plot revolves around the interactions between Arash and his undead love interest, a character Vand inhabits with a sense of melancholy. Their courtship often hinges on unspoken compromises, a pleasurable development thanks to the actors' ability to convey a range of emotions sans dialogue.
February 11, 2015
The Seventh Art
Amirpour‘s debut feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, is an amalgam of stylistic influences, including—but certainly not limited to—spaghetti westerns, '50s teenage movies, atmospheric horror films, and '80s Jim Jarmusch. For this reason, she is being called "the next Tarantino," but a more fitting comparison may be to another, younger auteur: Xavier Dolan, whose films share Amirpour's hip aesthetic and clear affection for beautiful scenes of slow motion set to pop songs.
January 22, 2015
This being [Amirpour's] debut film, the effort can feel a bit like genre stuntsmanship at times. But over the course of the experiment, A Girl Walks Home evolves into something far subtler and more evocative. This is a film that shocks us right out of the gate with its novelty, then metastasizes into a cry of defiance.
January 15, 2015
Amirpour's almost exclusive focus on nighttime exteriors in weird industrial locations (i.e., Bakersfield's oil refineries, factories, and railroad yards) recalls the nightmarish atmosphere of her hero David Lynch's ERASERHEAD but, combined with her impeccable taste in pop-music cues, creates a dreamy/druggy vibe that is both entrancing and wholly her own.
January 9, 2015
Such striking images reach beyond the screen and burn themselves into our consciousness. Amirpour's debut is a truly arresting work of art.
December 24, 2014
Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour displays an eclectic range of stylistic influences—Eraserhead and spaghetti westerns in addition to vampire movies and skateboarding videos—but for all the visual ambition, this doesn't add up to anything terribly substantial.
December 24, 2014
In this city, all characters are thrillingly hyper-stylized, cobbled together from disparate references to American, European, and Iranian pop culture. They are neither teenagers nor adults; neither predators nor prey. These characters speak only Farsi, but they make their homes among the abandoned factories and power plants of Bakersfield, California. They move through a space that is neither entirely Iranian nor American, but distinctly, insistently, informed by both places.
December 18, 2014
Amirpour almost gets away with some of the nothing that happens — it's like a Marjane Satrapi graphic novel with a John Hughes sense of hormones and mixtape. (You could watch this with the sound off, but the electro-pop soundtrack's too good.) She's got a handle on drollery and vibrant framing. This movie is funny and hot. The Girl drops her fangs the way a switchblade pops out of its casing. I jumped. Then I laughed, not at myself for jumping, but because Amirpour is having a Polanski moment.
December 5, 2014