Sidney Flanigan is absolutely brilliant in this playing a troubled teen with a secret to keep. It's hyper-real at times. We can feel her pain. Some utterly heartbreaking scenes including one single take piece of quality cinema.
It's downbeat, sombre, melancholic and moody. And those are it's best qualities. The viewer is reminded of British cinema in the vein of Andrea Arnold and perhaps Cristian Mungiu's '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days'. It's not over scripted, and it has a lovely washed out colour palette to ram home the "realness". Eliza Hittman is an extremely talented film-maker - Beach Rats was good, this is even better.
8.2/10
easily the best movie 2020. Brilliant!
A poignant fist to the gut. A love tap that leaves a bruise. Eliza Hittman makes a film so intimate about one young woman and all young women that it'll win your heart just to break it.
Not only do Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder make you feel the daily pain women have to put up with, they make you feel ashamed for the ways you cause it. By highlighting micro aggressions and macro aggressions, every man who watches this will be called on to question himself and come up with some real answers.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a tragic anthem to young womanhood and a personal banner to the cause that will affect you.
This film is incredible! It's brutal and very uncomfortable. It's an honest portrayal of abortion, but it's also a very real coming of age story about gender and friendship. With almost no dialogue, the performance and camera work tell you all you need to know about the story and how the characters are feeling. The small to big messed up actions that men do to women throughout this film almost made me cry, because it's sadly so real and so commonly overlooked.
It's an uncomfortable watch but it's good and Sidney Flanigan is great.
It's a sombre film, and one that plays out in true-to-life fashion. Flanigan is terrific in a difficult role, and the film, while occasionally patience-testing, is a worthy one.
I was expecting more and more tense in some points. 5.5/10
It's a good movie, its only fault is that a better movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) was made 13 years ago about the same subject.
Very bleak. I'd like to believe not all men are like what the men in this movie portrays. But to be honest, as a 20 something guy, I find that a very significant number of men are more or less the same. I sympathize with the women and girls who are in a bad situation. I felt miserable and helpless watching this. There were a few scenes where I expected worse things to happen. Fortunately they didn't.
a truly chilling depiction of the difficulties, in all areas, of the process of getting an abortion. couldn’t get more real.
Good OST made by Julia Holter, good cinematography, when all in NY, I did think about Safdie Bros before Good Time vibes. One of best movies titles ever.
Difficult decisions. Romania is not the United States, but it is similar at times. This life journey is heartbreaking. The main scene, that painful close-up, is a perfect description of the character (and the revelation of a great actress). It is a film that leaves a devastating residue. A vision of youth suddenly faced with brutal maturity. The strengthening of a great director.
This is a film about a girl that gets pregnant at 17. No mention is made of who the father is and obviously this is done intentionally. This film is unique in that it goes through a day (rather, a few days) in the life of a girl that just found out that she is pregnant. There isn't a lot of conversation about what is going on and we don't get a lot of information about what the girl is thinking outside of the expressions on her face. While there is a resolution (I hate saying it like that) the film ends in the same kind of cold way in which it began.
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i went into this movie completely blind, and it was amazing, i was completely blown away by how real this movie was.
Secretly leaving for New York City for the first time, a place which embodies the American dream like no other, purely for the sake of legally getting an abortion, is an unenviable and sad paradox. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a masterful exhibition of 'show, don't tell' storytelling; we know exactly what each character is feeling, despite the relative lack of dialogue in this film. This is no doubt a testament to Eliza Hittman's direction and screenplay, the camerawork, and above all else, an outstanding lead performance by Sidney Flanigan.
Social realist film-making at its finest.
Review by cutecruelBlockedParent2021-02-16T15:43:31Z
The United States of America :flag_us: always make tacky remakes that don't have a third of the charm of the original. Even though this is not even a remake, it’s just Americanized (plagiarized) version of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days :flag_ro:, which is, of course, directly the better, bleaker and more affecting movie of the two.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always tackles 3 topics:
1. Abortion. There is no character development from start to finish. These characters are basically robots, so I felt no empathy for the main girl in spite of the depressing matter. Her shitty attitude towards people also doesn’t help with that. The way she treats her cousin is terrible. She essentially pimps her out for bus tickets, I couldn’t understand why the girls didn’t ask for help from someone back home, instead of prostituting. The big moment of the movie (where its namesake comes from) is the only solid scene that really sparked any emotions. Other than that, Autumn is exactly the same at the end of the film as she is in the beginning. That’s why, I don’t get the praise for the acting, because it’s the same type of emotion being used the whole time.
2. Toxic masculinity. All of the male characters in this movie are creepy perverts. But they are one-dimensional caricatures - the step father calling the dog a slut, the guy who kisses hands all the time at grocery store - who does that? Creators are so blatantly concerned with their political message that they can’t create any sense of real characters. I like when the message isn’t right up in your face and forced. There's definitely room for toxic male presence, but the parade of awful men is too reductive for me. Americans have his simplistic view of “men bad, women good” when the reality is far more complex.
3. The third main character is … transport. Yes, you read it right, transport. Probably 75% of this movie shows the protagonist and her cousin going somewhere (or waiting to go somewhere) by bus, by metro, or by walk. All of this makes the movie very repetitive, there were far too many run on shots where nothing is said.
This is exactly the sort of film that makes critics drool all over at Sundance. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is the stereotypical independent film - little dialogue, zero characterization or plot, shaky cam, and bland cinematography. All of the long scenes with no dialogue are just an excuse for the lack of story, and have to give off this feeling of pseudo deepness because the movie contains an important message.