“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” director Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian vampire western, and “The Homesman” starring Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank began Jan. 9 at The Ross.
“The Homesman” is rated R and plays through Jan. 22. “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is not rated and plays through Jan. 15.
In “A Girl …”, strange things are afoot in Bad City, the Iranian ghost town home to prostitutes, pimps and other sordid souls including a lonely vampire who hunts the town’s most unsavory inhabitants. But when boy meets girl an unusual love story begins to blossom blood red. The first Iranian vampire western, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut basks in the sheer pleasure of pulp. A joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave.
In “The Homesman,” three women living on the edge of the American frontier are driven mad by harsh pioneer life and the task of saving them falls to the pious, independent-minded Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank). Transporting the women by covered wagon to Iowa, she soon realizes just how daunting the journey will be and employs a low-life drifter, George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), to join her.
The unlikely pair and the three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter) head east, where a waiting minister and his wife (Meryl Streep) have offered to take the women in. But the group first must traverse the harsh Nebraska Territories marked by stark beauty, psychological peril and constant threat.
