Logo

Stranger than Paradise

Director : Jim Jarmusch
Writer : Jim Jarmusch
Runtime : 89 min
Country : USA | West Germany
Language : English | Hungarian
Color : Black and White
Release : 1984


Willie a self-styled New York hipster (John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards) is paid a suprise and quite unwelcome visit by his pretty sixteen-year-old Hungarian cousin. From initial hostility and indifference a strange affection grows between the two exiles. Due to complete boredom they decide to visit their aunt in the wastelands of Cleveland, proceeding on to Florida, they lose all their money, unwittingly gain a fortune and with a final ironic twist, they end up back where they began.

Stranger Than Paradise broke many conventions of traditional Hollywood filmmaking,and became a landmark work in modern independent film. According to allmovie, it is "one of the most influential movies of the 1980s", and cast "a wide shadow over the new generation of independent American filmmakers to come. It is cited for giving "an early example of the low-budget independent wave that would dominate the cinematic marketplace a decade later." The success of the film accorded Jarmusch a certain iconic status within arthouse cinema, as an idiosyncratic and uncompromising auteur exuding the aura of urban cool embodied by downtown Manhattan. In a 2005 profile of the director for The New York Times, critic Lynn Hirschberg declared the film to have "permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form".

In 2002, Stranger Than Paradise was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film was included in Jonathan Rosenbaum's Alternate 100, which was a response to the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movies list. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked the film #26 on their list of "The Top 50 Cult Films".