Shot in California but set in a fictional Iranian ghost town, this black-and-white mood piece (2014) centers on a skateboarding female vampire who preys on petty criminals, all of them male. Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour displays an eclectic range of stylistic influences—Eraserhead and spaghetti westerns in addition to vampire movies and skateboarding videos—but for all the visual ambition, this doesn’t add up to anything terribly substantial. The movie might be construed as a feminist statement, with the vampire’s killing spree serving as a metaphorical attack on Iranian chauvinism. I didn’t find much in the trifling narrative to support this reading, but maybe I was too distracted by the pretentious imagery. In Farsi with subtitles.