Stranger Than Paradise

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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. Read full review

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

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. Read full review

Jarmusch's punk minimalist style, deadpan humor and delicious timing are all his own, and his oddball drifters, whose major goal in life is hanging out, are three slob existential stooges Sam Beckett might envy. You wouldn't choose to hunker down with them in real life, but they're great company on screen. These dead-end kids may be headed nowhere not so fast, but their oddball odyssey is headed straight for cult-movie heaven. [08 Oct 1984, p.87]

Jarmusch's eye for blighted landscape (he films in a grainy black and white) is hilariously sharp, and he sends his performers on their zomboid rounds with a keen sense of rhythm and interplay. Read full review

Jarmusch keeps the picture formal and cool, and it has an odd, nonchalant charm; it's fun. But it's softhearted fun--shaggy-dog minimalism--and it doesn't have enough ideas (or laughs) for its 90-minute length.