Critic Reviews

It is like no other film you've seen, and yet you feel right at home in it. It seems to be going nowhere, and knows every step it wants to make. It is a constant, almost kaleidoscopic experience of discovery, and we try to figure out what the film is up to and it just keeps moving steadfastly ahead, fade in, fade out, fade in, fade out, making a mountain out of a molehill.

Jim Jarmusch’s breakthrough film Stranger Than Paradise — famously described by its director as a neo-realistic black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European director obsessed with Ozu and The Honeymooners — captures something essential about the American character: the contradictory desire to be anonymous and to be identified, to blend into the crowd and yet still stand out.

There's more going on in the film's mundane moments than the excitement its heroes imagine is waiting beyond the horizon. They never find the postcard America they were promised, but there's a lot of beauty, and a lot of America, in the way they keep searching for it, never quite saying what's on their mind as they go.

Jim Jarmusch’s minimalist meditation on a trio of misfits who wander across the U.S. Shot in crisp black and white, the film is a series of 67 single takes punctuated by moments of black screen.

From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell. [16 Nov 1984]

The film has no big scenes, and it takes a while to get the hang of it, but once you do, it's as funny as it is wise. The three lead performers are extremely good, never for a second betraying the film's consistently deadpan style.

Jim Jarmusch tried to create the essential road movie and although he didn't manage that, he has still created a classic that captures perfectly the life of a drifter in New York.

Not a lot to it, certainly, but the acting and performances combine to produce an obliquely effective study of the effect of landscape upon emotion, and the wry, dry humour is often quite delicious.

A bleak but mordantly funny portrait of three aimless characters who discover that paradise isn't such an easy place to find.

Stranger than Paradise is a bracingly original avant-garde black comedy. Begun as a short which was presented under the same title at some earlier festivals, film has been expanded in outstanding fashion by young New York writer-director Jim Jarmusch.