Down by Law

Island Pictures | Release Date: September 20, 1986

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

75	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 20 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

The TelegraphMartin Chilton

Alternately downbeat, witty, bleak and optimistic. Down by Law is a delight, right down to the unexpected last scene. Read full review

100

Time Out LondonTom Huddleston

The claustrophobic setting and semi-improvised tone might suggest something closer to sitcom than cinema (had Jarmusch seen Porridge?), but Robby Müller’s stately monochrome photography single-handedly lifts it into the realm of Proper Art. It’s a sad and beautiful world indeed. Read full review

100

Emma Johnston

A stylish black-and-white prison romp with a sense of humour as offbeat as its perfectly cast stars (John Lurie, Roberto Benigni and singer Tom Waits). Read full review

The GuardianPeter Bradshaw

Down By Law is effortlessly laidback, superbly elegant. Jarmusch made it look easy. Read full review

Vincent Canby

The excitement of Down by Law comes not from what it's about. Reduced to its plot, it is very slight. But the plot isn't the point. The excitement comes from the realization that we are seeing a true film maker at work, using film to create a narrative that couldn't exist on the stage or the printed page of a novel. Read full review

Scott Tobias

Jarmusch's superb Down By Law can be described as many things–a minimalist fairytale, a modern twist on '30s prison dramas, an existential comedy–but it's memorable first and foremost as a richly textured look at old New Orleans and the enchanted bayou surrounding it. Read full review

Rita Kempley

There's so much to see and imagine, so many twists left to ponder in such a complicated and multi-layered tale. The temptation -- and some of the fun -- is to analyze Down By Law to death, to chew on it. Hyper-intellectualizing aside, it's pure pleasure for comedy connoisseurs. Read full review

Sheila Benson

The humor of Down by Law is marginally easier to describe than Stranger Than Paradise, but only because, by now, we have a small idea of Jarmusch's style. It's still a kind of humor that evaporates as you try to explain it. Also eluding description is the beauty, the street poetry and the precision of the images caught by Jarmusch and his cameraman, the great Robby Muller, whose black-and-white photography illuminated the early films of Wim Wenders. They have created a dream New Orleans, more succinct and more haunting than the city itself, and Lurie has set it to music. Read full review

Joseph Jon Lanthier

Divorcing New Orleans from its stereotypes (there’s no ham-fisted Creole dialogue, no digs at the indigenous cuisine), the filmmaker imagines the boiling, boggy city as a purgatory for lost souls, spotted with cinephiliac mold. Read full review

Jay Scott

Photographed in stark black and white by Robby Muller with music by both Waits and Lurie, Down By Law (a slang expression meaning in control), more conventional and livelier than Stranger Than Paradise, and a lot less strange, is as up to date as tomorrow and as familiar as yesterday. [19 Sep 1986]

Adam Lowes

In many ways, Down by Law feels like the quintessential Jarmusch. It's a perfect distillation of that strange whimsy and resolutely deadpan humour - harvested via the director's life-long passion for world cinema. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

As with the Jarmusch’s best work, it is kept simple and taken very slowly and is just sort of allowed to happen. The magic lies in the lulls. Read full review

Roger Ebert

It doesn't have the inspired perfection of Stranger Than Paradise, in which every shot seemed inevitable. But it's a good movie, and the more you know about movies, the more you're likely to like it. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The Jim Jarmusch penchant for off-the-wall characters and odd situations is very much in evidence. The black-and-white photography is a major plus, and so is John Lurie’s score, with songs by Tom Waits. Both men are fine in their respective roles, but Benigni steals the film. Read full review

Bill Cosford

Minimalist, yes; post-modern self-conscious, to a fault. But giddy, fanciful and at times simply obvious. [21 Nov 1986, p.D10]

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

Director-writer Jarmusch's characters are insignificant antiheroes adrift in an America that is both sad and beautiful. Jarmusch has a powerful visual sense, but he is weaker in the realm of content. The jazzy relationship between Lurie and Waits never quite clicks. As a result Down By Law merely reiterates the ideas about people and American life that Jarmusch had already stated more richly in Stranger Than Paradise. Read full review

Paul Attanasio

Jarmusch likes to make movies that are slow and desultory and unresolved, and to beat him over the head with his vision would be unfair. In Down by Law, he's made that kind of movie, but he's worked from the outside in. He's made a Jim Jarmusch film instead of just making a film; his self-consciousness leaves you at arm's length. Read full review

Pat Graham

Some scuzzily noirish moments, thanks to Robby Müller's slick black-and-white cinematography, but once the deadbeat trio get thrown into their cell, the film comes to a virtual halt: it's minimalism reinforcing minimalism, with none of the subtle counterpoint between movement and stasis, environmental opening out and psychological shrinking in, that gave Stranger its small energetic charge. Read full review

Dave Kehr

Jarmusch's whole method consists of reversing expectations. The problem with that method is that you quickly begin to expect the reversals; the unpredictability becomes predictable. Jarmusch is a talented filmmaker, with an original sense of humor and a sharp and distinctive visual style, but he won't be a great filmmaker until he stops approaching his material from the outside. Read full review

Pauline Kael

Jarmusch's passive style has its wit, but the style is deadening here until he brings in Roberto--a character out of folk humor. And without the boredom of the first three-quarters of an hour Roberto wouldn't be so funny.