Stranger Than Paradise

In Jim Jarmusch’s classic hangdog fable, a pair of deadbeat hipsters and a teenage immigrant (indelibly played by John Lurie, Richard Edson, and Squat Theater’s Eszter Balint) elevate hanging-out to one of the fine arts. Shot by director-to-be Tom DiCillo with a keen eye for desolation and disrepair, the film moves from the empty streets of Manhattan’s ungentrified Lower East Side to the suburban sprawl of Cleveland to the scrubby Florida coastline. It was Jarmusch himself who most evocatively described the film’s winning if incongruous tone: “a neo-realistic black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European director obsessed with Ozu and The Honeymooners.”