NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS ****

 Covid 19 might have closed cinemas and put the brakes on those big studio blockbusters a lot of people were looking forward to in the last 12 months, meaning we had to get our kicks at home and, if we're honest, where better to see 'small', largely independent films and to realise just how many good movies are currently being made by first-time or fledgling directors and just how many of these directors are women. Eliza Hittman's "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" is just one of these films and it's undoubtedly one of the best.

This is just Hittman's third film, (her last was the excellent "Beach Rats"), and her star Sidney Flanigan's debut. Flanigan is Autumn, a 17 year old girl from Pennsylvania who, with her friend Skylar, (an excellent Talia Ryder), travels to New York to have an abortion. This is a woman's picture in the very sense of the term, dealing with the kind of issues only women have to deal with since only women and girls get pregnant and Hittman approaches the subject in a very matter-of-fact, open-ended fashion. Autumn seems to want an abortion because she doesn't think of the baby she is carrying as a person but more of an illness, something she needs to be cured of, both physically and psychologically; a stigma to be removed. Hittman's film is neither pro nor anti-abortion but a picture of a young girl in a situation not of her making and the circumstances of her pregnancy are withheld from us for some time and then only revealed slowly through the questions that give the film its title..

Hittman films it like a documentary. It helps that her actors are not known to us and both Flanigan and Ryder underplay beautifully, (Flanigan has already won the New York Critics' Best Actress prize), and unlike other films dealing with abortion Hittman isn't judgemental nor is her film particularly grim. There's nothing melodramatic in the way she tells her story. I can just imagine how Hollywood would have handled this, milking it for every emotional response an audience is capable of. Indeed, not a great deal happens; we get to know Autumn gradually and Flanigan is good enough for us to wonder where the actress ends and the character begins. It's certainly not a film that will appeal to a mass audience but it may be the best film you will see all year.