‘Gas Food Lodging’

Allison Anders’ low-budget 1992 independent film, about an all-female family of three in the desert stop of Laramie, N.M., gives you a sense of the flow and flux of towns, their isolation, lassitude and entrapment. There’s real shrewdness and compassion in its depiction of ordinary lives, but also a curious, lyrical sense of romance and mystery. The main characters--waitress Nora (Brooke Adams) and her daughters Trude (Ione Skye) and Shade (Fairuza Balk)--are wonderfully drawn. These women are the focus: the men in their lives are both the problem and the potential escape hatch (TMC Thursday at 2:40 a.m.).