A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night bills itself as the first Iranian vampire western, which sounds like a film-school dare, except Ana Lily Amirpour pulls it off with ridiculous amounts of cool. Shot in California's Central Valley in high-contrast black-and-white and spoken entirely in Persian, the movie follows a nameless, lonely vampire (Sheila Vand) who glides through the industrial wasteland of "Bad City" on a skateboard, wearing a striped Breton shirt under a flowing black chador.

If you have a teenager who is getting into film, photography, or graphic novels, this is prime co-watching material. It is rated-R territory in spirit—mostly because of a bleak subplot involving a heroin-addicted father and a sleazy pimp with a neck tattoo—so it is a high-school pick rather than family movie night. The vampire violence is sharp and bloody when it hits, though the movie is much more interested in lonely twenty-somethings listening to vinyl records under a spinning disco ball than it is in jump scares.