Kritiken

Hittman’s minimalism mutates from abstracted avoidance into a kind of strength, if not always a consummate method. If I sometimes felt frustrated with the film’s vagueness, I could not refute its depiction of the way social strictures drain women’s lives.

Even in these scenes, Hittman maintains the film’s tone of harsh reality. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a serious film about the difficulties young women face in getting an abortion in America.

Flanigan and Ryder pull the movie off with impossible subtlety, and Hittman matches them beat for beat.

Remaining almost painfully close to the specificity of an American experience she knows, understands and expresses so well, Hittman has put the bar very high.

It’s a movie whose political significance works in tandem with its deep interest in the human element.

Hittman lays out the stakes of a moral argument around women’s bodies.

One byproduct of its understated approach is that it never quite detonates the way you might expect it to—it doesn’t have the wild, outrageous tonal peaks of a satirical comedy like Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth or the provocative, borderline horror-movie imagery of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Its achievement is closer in tone to the observational solidarity of Varda or the thoughtful Americana of Kelly Reichardt.

Hittman rests the film almost entirely on that face (have you ever seen this many close-ups of  a single actor?) and about the collaboration between the director, the actor, and cinematographer Helene Louvert, whose handheld 16-mm camera is synced to every flicker of inner life and every change of light.

Refusing to grandstand, Hittman has made a vital film about the perils of female adolescence in a country rank with hypocrisy, hysteria, and worse about sexually active young women.

Victimhood makes Never Rarely Sometimes Always the latest example of politicized filmmaking as the Hollywood norm. Its message overwhelms storytelling craft and reason.

For the sake of protocol, the doctors ask Autumn to state the name of the procedure before the anesthesia kicks in. At the end of this journey, it seems like such a humble request. But in that dissonance, Hittman beautifully illustrates how much is contained within this seemingly straightforward statement.

Information doesn't just facilitate a procedure that might feel daunting to young viewers, it also steers Autumn’s orbit and alludes to the film’s grander scope and emotional intentions.