Popular reviews

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★½ 22

  This is definitely my favorite version of Jarmusch, the dude of stationary solitude and existentialist inertia with an air of coolness. I. Simply. Love this Jarmusch.

  For starters, Jarmusch is a director of artistic and cultural inspirations: books, films and songs of all ages, Jarmusch is a living amalgamation of styles and trends that refuses the existence of originality. Everything is the result of something previously done and represented either intellectually or stylistically, a philosophy that I fully support. Since the film opens, you can see Jarmusch’s aesthetic director stamp, but as the film progresses, you slowly begin to unravel his possible influences. Even if you encountered Jarmusch one day and he told you that you perceived his influences wrong,…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  Eddie seems to state the film's thesis while stomping across a snow-covered railroad track, baldly noting that everywhere looks the same. It's a depressing note, and it's a depressing film. Maybe there's some hope buried in it somewhere, but mostly, it's ennui and boredom, failure and loneliness. While Eva and Eddie are at least relatable, Willie is defiantly a hard loner with little to recommend him.

  The greyscale of the film fits its dreariness well. Even the sarcastically labelled "paradise" of Florida is left lifeless by it, a contrast to most depictions that I am sure many jaded Floridians appreciate. It reinforces the idea that all of these places look the same, much as the continual refrain from Eva's favorite…

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  Review by Tasha Robinson ★★★★ 3

  Jim Jarmusch's "wherever you go, it's all the same" movie may feel a little cynical about the joys of the world — here, the joys are mostly a stolen pack of cigarettes, an old cartoon on TV, and a win at the racetrack — but it's a terrific moody character study and it feels like the Rosetta Stone to understanding Jim Jarmusch's film rhythms, the way he lingers on shots and lets his characters sit around so viewers can study and understand them. This is a film about people fighting to define themselves in spite of other people's expectations, but the fights are so subtle that they get summed up in the way the characters stand, and sit, and look at each other, and listen to music.

  We'll get into a lot more detail about this film on the next edition of the Next Picture Show podcast, where we've paired it with Jarmusch's newest film, Paterson.

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  Review by Taylor Williams ★★★★ 2

  Brilliant in that it gets you on board with the movie going nowhere, convinces you that the substantial joy to be had is in the minimalist notes, and then ends in a fit of irony that actually utilizes details you just accept as borderline-extraneous at the beginning to be cathartic and conclusive. Again, it makes a strong enough case that the story doesn’t need to go anywhere to be good, but it certainly helps punctuate things.

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★★

  No matter where you go, or how many places you leave, you just can’t escape this empty, desolate, late-modernist, greyscale world in which you’re trapped.

  The loadstar that would ultimately guide the 90’s indie boom, making so much of an impact on American Cinema that a decade later independent movies, almost monolithically, were still trying to be some variation of this, either in form or in spirit.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½ 1

  "Now we look like real tourists."

  not to come off like an utterly pretentious jerk but this kept reminding me of a phrase in James Dickey's "To the White Sea" (in its way another trek to a frozen wasteland in search of a deeply personal notion of freedom) in which the main character refers to "the sound of the no-sound", a sort of cosmic peace that's already around him but that he struggles to fully appreciate.

  these characters have cast off integral or distinctive parts (or in the case of Edson's character those parts are never really revealed, although it's worth noting that he might as well be Lurie's twin), specifically their foreignness, searching for some intrinsically American experience that's…

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  Review by Jay 👽 ★★★★★ 5

  I didn't quite get this when I first saw it years ago as a young lad, and today I finally understood why. It's because I hadn't been through my twenties yet.

  At age 26, I can spectacularly declare that this is the most viciously accurate cinematic portrayal of post-teenage life I've ever seen. The whimsy is gone, and it's replaced with worry. Dear love between family and friends turns into dull connection out of necessity. The sense of adventure goes, because every place you visit starts to look and feel exactly the same. So what do you do? You sit around your cheap, shitty digs, you smoke and you watch TV, waiting for something to happen.

  It's amazing that almost forty years after this film's release, it seems like almost nothing has changed. Just put phones in their hands and you've got a monochromatic 2023.

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  Review by Sam Thompson ★★★★½ 4

  Something about Stranger Than Paradise just hit different. Dare I say, I've never seen anything else quite like it. Jarmusch so brilliantly captures the metronome-like way we want to both be alone and have company. He evokes something through it's unassuming runtime that I'm honestly going to struggle to describe.

  Willie, Eva and Eddie all meander through life without much direction. It's a road movie where nothing really happens whilst also being a hang out nothing movie where something happens. The dettachment from reality is so obvious as they search for something without knowing what that something is. The boredom from not even knowing what to do with yourself is so elegantly displayed. This is why I found this movie…

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  Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★★ 1

  The land of the free puts a spell on you: ennui, alienation and cultural dislocation; after all, it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 20

  CRITERION CHALLENGE 2021: 1. A film from the year of the Criterion Collection's inception (1984)

  Progress: 7/52

  "Does Cleveland look a little bit like, uh, Budapest?"

  Perhaps the most laconic comedy I've had the pleasure to see (many times now), Jim Jarmusch described his sophomore breakthrough Stranger than Paradise as a story "about connections that are just barely missed." In it the unreadable auteur shines a dingy light on the tentative efforts at intimacy between a trio of marginalized bohemians as assimilated Hungarian émigré cum downtown layabout hipster Willie (Lounge Lizards co-founder John Lurie) first rejects and later yearns for comradeship with his droll, poker-faced teenage cousin Eva (Eszter Balint), newly arrived from the Eastern Bloc's "happiest barrack" with little…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 10

  The only thing I really know for certain about these Jim Jarmusch movies is that I don't feel like I know enough about film to explain what they do that's so magical. Like with Down By Law, I came away from Stranger Than Paradise having fallen in love with all three protagonists. Something about them just feels so much more genuine than I'm used to. I also love the way Jarmusch shoots his scenes, basically choosing a location for the camera and moving it as little as possible until the scene ends. Maybe it's cinematic minimalism, but for me it's much more aesthetically pleasing than something which is constantly cutting to new angles.

  One thing I don't quite understand about…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 14

  “Stranger Than Paradise” is an immigrant experience film without the most American aspect of assimilation; striving. 

  Jim Jarmusch‘a second feature is as minimalist in presentation as it is in ideology. It is peak cool, because it wants for nothing. Why desire, when the entire world blends into the same four walls and door? 

  Sharing heritage with Fellini’s “I Vitelloni,” Jarmusch dabbles in the art of youthful inaction during “Stranger.” 

  Following two young men and a cousin recently arrived from Hungary, Jarmusch‘s film, while shot across New Jersey, Florida, and his native Ohio, is late stage Sovietism cooked up American-style. 

  With snowy vistas that fade into blankness, and Spartan motel rooms, “Stranger” - a series of single shot scenes, forces the…