Paris, Texas

It is an eerie, sad story whose meaning disappears over the vast horizon as if on a highway heading away through the desert. Read full review

Then there are the miracles of the performances by Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski and Hunter Carson. Read full review

So many mood pieces sustain their mood only as far as the closing credits; the blissful melancholy of Paris, Texas endures with recall and association, however distant from one’s last viewing. Cannes has rewarded many a great film, but none that is quite so permanently, ever-retrievably embedded in my sense memory. Read full review

Enigmatic and fascinating. Read full review

Wim Wenders’ heartbreaking, profoundly American masterpiece...The climactic scene – set in a peep-show booth – features a stunning autographical monologue that’s one of the most mesmerizing pieces of screen acting ever filmed. Read full review

Superbly scripted, the film features wonderful performances from all its major players. Equally brilliant, especially in a film that emphasizes script and character, is the cinematography by Robby Muller, perfectly capturing the notion of "America." A final factor in PARIS, TEXAS's success is the remarkably haunting score by blues musician Ry Cooder. Read full review

It’s indeed a beautiful film, one that will surely convince doubters that Muller is one of the cinema’s best cameramen. He gives the story a surface polish that hints of Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe Americana paintings. Some images are positively breathtaking. Read full review

Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist. Read full review

Like Wenders's other road movies, this is largely about the spaces between people and the words they speak—Antonioni updated and infused with German romanticism; the various means of indirection through which the hero communicates with his son (Hunter Carson) and wife (Nastassja Kinski) constitute a striking motif. Read full review

Paris, Texas has an undeniable power. There is certainly a sort of transcendence to be found in the sight of Travis, wearing those 40 miles of rough road on his face, finally finding a measure of peace. Read full review

Paris, Texas begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out. Read full review

It's no shameless Hollywood weepie, mind you, but an overestheticized, coolly abstracted weepie, which is not necessarily better. [19 Nov 1984, p.132]

Paris, Texas is thus a curiosity. On balance it seems overblown and rickety, as substantial as tumbleweed. And it seems to be less than the sum of its two major parts, the script by Shepard and the images by Wenders. Still, it's an essential entry into the Wenders file, full of hollow portents and signs signifying little. And it would be worth seeing for Stanton's performance alone. [8 Feb 1985, p.8]