Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Each month, one of our VIFF+ Premium members gets the opportunity to share one of their favourite movies with friends and the wider VIFF community. This month, Michael Misfeldt has chosen Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always. As Michael points out, this film’s theatrical release was curtailed by the outbreak of Covid 19, so this is a rare chance (maybe the first?) to see it in Vancouver in the cinema.

Sidney Flanigan is 17-year-old Autumn. Unable to get an abortion without parental consent in Pennsylvania, she persuades her bff Skylar (Talia Ryder) to come with her to New York, where different rules apply. But what she hopes will be a short trip turns into a desperate ordeal.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always manages to blend the gritty authenticity of a documentary with the poetic sensibility of pure cinema… it is perhaps best described as a perfectly observed portrait of female friendship; a coming-of-age story with road-movie inflections, piercingly honest and deeply affecting. The result is a film that combines the melancholy magic of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy with the humanist artfulness of the Dardenne brothers’ finest neorealist works. Perfectly pitched and sensitively played, this is truthful, powerful and profoundly moving fare from a film-maker at the very top of her game.

Mark Kermode, The Observer

Here, a woman’s right to self-determination has become the stuff of a new and radical heroic journey.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Eliza Hittman continues to prove herself as one of contemporary cinema’s most empathetic and skilled chroniclers of American youth.

A-, Kate Erbland, IndieWire

With empathy and outrage that cut equally deeply, Hittman reminds us: This is a girl’s life in a man’s world.

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post