[In Blue Collar Schrader] seems to have been influenced by both Godard and Antonioni—the former in the deadening ritual of the assembly line itself, and the latter in the chromatic utilization of industrial artifacts as art objects in their own right. The movie has an interesting look to it as Schrader tries to make a painterly comment on the pathetic bleakness of low-level industrial landscapes.

But the pacing is something else again, as much of Blue Collar turns out to be stylistically and thematically indecisive, inarticulate, and incoherent. At first the movie seems to be striving for a comically absurdist tone on the order of Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberte and Charles Chaplin's Modern Times…. [We] are slowly made to understand that something more serious is afoot. Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey are propelled with minimal preparation into a robbery of the union treasury. But the model...