“And that’s when my dentist told me to floss daily.” Image via The Dissolve

When watching a feature directorial debut, look not just at how good the movie is, but how much promise it shows. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the feature directorial debut of Ana Lily Amirpour, is not perfect, but the amount of promise it shows is hard to describe.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night wears its genre influences on its sleeves. If you can catch even half the references, then you will walk out with just a few more cool points added to your credibility. This is genre mashup that is sometimes incoherent, yet always riveting to watch.

Set in an Iranian ghost town called Bad City during an unspecified point in time, Girl chronicles a vague dystopia in which the borders are lined with ditches filled with dead bodies, the sun never seems to shine, and heroin is just the way people connect with one another. So basically, it is like a really horrifying Bruce Springsteen song come to life. There is no better way to explore human connection than through a vampire. Girl has been marketed as an “Iranian Vampire Western,” which is a perfect way to find a niche audience. Like any good western, the lead is never given a name. She is a vampire who wanders the empty streets at night, feasting on whatever lonely men happen to cross her path. But then, she finds love, or at least feelings in general, in Arash (Arash Marandi) who is sometimes as cool as James Dean and other times as awkward as Ben Braddock.

Yes, this is a film about a teenage vampire who finds love. However, this is not the indie version of Twilight. Amirpour has definitely watched enough vampire films to identify tropes and then subvert them. A Girl Walks Home finds the humanity in a vampire by showing that there actually isn’t that much of a difference between man and vampire. Sure, The Girl has agency and shows no fear, yet she is cripplingly lonely when finally confronted with love. It probably helps that Sheila Vand saw more than a just vampire in her character. With very few words, she creates a character who is both lovely and terrifying. Enjoy hearing her say “are you a bad boy?” in Farsi.

You will probably walk away from this film with very little understanding of what happened. What is certain, however, is that Ana Lily Amirpour was born to be a filmmaker. She barely needs a story; all she needs is some good lighting and even better music to convey emotions. Bad City doesn’t really exist, but it feels like a place that was invented both by experience and nightmares. The best kind of vision is one in which it feels like a director is inviting you into their weird little world. There is no better example of this than the scene where The Girl puts on White Lies’ “Death” (which I thought was a Cure song at first, because I’m not good at being cool) on her record player while her and Arash get the feels. I just want to hug scenes like this and live in them forever. Amirpour understands how to appeal to both the film snob and the sad teenager inside all of us.

Girl Walks Home is all over the place, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Sometimes, it feels like a French New Wave Spaghetti Western, and other times it feels like Near Dark by way of David Lynch. It is a scrappy debut, but one that deserves your attention. In the same way that Reservoir Dogs showed that Tarantino was a budding master at writing dialogue and Who’s That Knocking at My Door showed that Scorsese was a budding master at turning violence into art, Girl Walks Home shows Amirpour as a budding master of mashing up genres while capturing loneliness through sight and sound.

So to answer the question that you are probably asking, this film is not necessarily accessible to the casual filmgoer. But if you take the risk and go see A GIrl Walks Home Alone at Night, you might walk away from the black and white facade and immediately into the nearest video store you can find (a few of these still exist) with a pile of movies you had never heard of before.

“Hey Kristen…do you think the seat between us is symbolism for the distance in our relationship.” “Sure Bill.” Image via IFC

For a film starring a guy known for his Alan Alda impression and a girl known for her awkward stammering, The Skeleton Twins sure is sad. In fact, the biggest laugh you will get out of The Skeleton Twins is from a joke about a famous dead dog.

The Skeleton Twins checks off a myraid of indie movie cliches, from white people being sad underwater, to white people being sad while sticking their head out of a car window. A good alternate title for this film would be Little Miss Zoloft.

Bill Hader plays Milo, a struggling actor who hits rock bottom and attempts suicide. His twin sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig) is about to commit suicide, before she is informed about her brother. *cue Alec Baldwin voiceover* The siblings hadn’t spoken in 10 years. So Maggie takes Milo in to her quaint little home in Upstate New York, and the pair spends the next 90 minutes working out their problems. It’s like watching a therapy session for the small price of $15 (okay, so that’s not a lot in New York standards).

Like any good film, The Skeleton Twins is an example of empathy. Here are two characters that have done some terrible things, and yet it always seems possible that they can move on beyond their mistakes.

Writing and acting is something of a symbiotic relationship: one can’t be good without the other. While The Skeleton Twins has some quality dialogue and some killer dark humor, the performances elevate it to another level. Hader maintains some of the silliness that has made him such a comedy star. Then his amazing and unexpected monologue about peaking in high school becomes the film’s thesis statement. Meanwhile, Wiig does a great Margot Tenenbaum impression as a woman who maybe settled just a bit too much. Speaking of the Tenenbaums, Luke Wilson makes a great comeback to the big screen as Maggie’s unassuming and sincere husband. He’s the kind of guy who would wear a “Pain is Temporary, Pride Lasts Forever” t-shirt, and he is an unfortunate bystander during the twins’ reign of terror. Hopefully, this means Luke Wilson won’t have to act in any more AT&T commercials.

Typically, overly dramatic films can be painful to watch, as if the director is taking joy in making the audience sad. However, The Skeleton Twins feels like the right kind of sadness. It is the kind of story that believes there is a way out, and that even the tiniest gesture, like fixing a fish tank, can amend a relationship. This is not a film about characters who only know pain. It is about characters with a bright past, and a bleak present. However, that doesn’t mean that there best days are behind them.

Brain Farts From The Edge

• Okay, maybe I made this sound a tad too grim. Just know that there’s a scene where Milo and Maggie get high in a dentist’s office.
• I think I might have groaned like, twice during the film’s running time. Not bad.
• This isn’t exactly Luke Wilson’s big comeback. For that, you should watch every single episode of Enlightened right now.
• The Skeleton Twins was produced by Jay and Mark Duplass. Right now, the Duplass seal of approval is the indie world’s equivalent of the Colbert Bump.
• Good job, guy who won an Emmy for Modern Family this year for no reason.
• The film’s portrayal of suicide and depression was making me think of Robin Williams again. We still miss you, Robin.
• Having just graduated from Syracuse, the film, which is set somewhere in the Hudson Valley, made me miss that part of the state of New York that isn’t Manhattan.
• As I wrote recently, dysfunctional families are just more fun than normal families.

Seriously…what’s the deal with babies?! Image via Sundance

Obvious Child has been labeled as “that abortion movie,” which is the equivalent of labeling Trainspotting as “that heroin movie.” Obvious Child is not a film about a controversial topic, it is a film about people dealing with issues and, well, being people.

Obvious Child is the feature film debut of writer-director Gillian Robespierre who, despite sharing the last name of an evil historical figure, has a gentle touch in dealing with tough and sensitive issues. Sometimes, Obvious Child feels so naturalistic that it resembles something that is not even a film at all. It tells the story of Donna Stern (Jenny Slate), a Jewish comedian (I have to point this out, given that this movie is Cultural Judaism incarnate) going through a millennial crisis, which is a midlife crisis that somebody in their 20s might go through. Her stand-up is funny and honest, yet it isn’t getting her much work.

To top it all off, Donna’s boyfriend breaks up with her, after revealing that he has been cheating on her with one of her friends. What a dick. She has just about reached bottom, where her father (Richard Kind, a friendly father figure if I ever did see one) reminds her that sometimes the best creative energy comes from these low moments.

During one of her lower moments, has a one night stand with a stranger named Max (Jake Lacy). The two of them are opposites, to say the least. He is a pair of boat shoes to Donna’s orange crocs. Protection is forgotten and a few pregnancy tests later, Donna discovers that she is pregnant. As quickly as the female characters of Juno and Knocked Up decided to keep their respective babies, Donna decides to get an abortion. Much to my relief, Obvious Child is not a film carrying a big political message along with it. It does explore moral or ethical implications, it is simply about living with making a big decision, which is why it way more than just “that abortion movie.”

Obvious Child is first and foremost a comedy that luckily never uses this issue as a crutch. In fact, it never goes for the easy joke at all. The best comedy comes out of truthfulness, and like Donna, who strives to speak honestly on stage, this film seeks to make us laugh through honest moments. That honesty might come in the form of humiliation, like a poorly timed pee fart, which is amongst the funniest of the fart kingdom. Donna is a comedian and the film contains long stretches of her standup. They are not necessarily to underline a theme like in Seinfeld and Louie. Rather, they show character growth and maturity. In this regard, these moments remind me a lot of the musical numbers in Inside Llewyn Davis.

Perhaps now is the best time to mention Jenny Slate, who kills it as Donna Stern. I wouldn’t be surprised if Slate is playing a bizarro version of herself here, but that doesn’t make her performance any less powerful. Of course she is funny, but she shows the kind of dramatic chops that you would not at all expect from half of Publizity. I am not saying that I doubted Jenny Slate’s talent. What I am saying is that I didn’t expect to watch this film and feel my heart break along with her’s as she stood outside her ex-boyfriend’s house in a desperate act that is both relatable and illogical. Good comedians are funny. Great comedians know the right moment to turn the funny off.

While the writing is fantastic, I think Obvious Child might have been another middling Brooklyn dramedy without Slate’s help. Nonetheless, Obvious Child stands out from the rest of the pack. Many of its scenes run long, but that is because they capture the natural rhythm of conversation. The film is short, but it feels like it ends where it is supposed to end; it never overstays its welcome. A romantic comedy about real world consequences, Obvious Child feels like a fairytale and a nightmare all at once, which I think is the highest possible compliment that I could give it.

Brain Farts From The Edge

• Undateable recently made me realize how much I hate movies and TV shows that are set in lifeless bars. If it were real life, the people that mattered most would be drowned out by a million other noises. Obvious Child makes the home-base bar actually look fun.
• If you want to understand why I like Jenny Slate so much, go watch Kroll Show right now.
• This film deserves way more credit for great writing than I initially realized. There are so many points where it could fall into the indie traps of Brooklyn and the MPDG, but it never does.
• I would love to see a talk show hosted by Richard Kind called “Kind Thoughts.”
• Rock on, A24. They’re having about as good of a year as Phil Lord and Chris Miller are having.
• Obvious Child: Come for the Birthright jokes, stay for the pee farts.