With this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at its most offbeat. Jarmusch follows rootless Hungarian émigré Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and his visiting sixteen-year-old cousin, Eva (Eszter Balint), as they drift from New York’s Lower East Side to the snowy expanses of Lake Erie and the drab beaches of Florida, always managing to make the least of wherever they end up. Structured as a series of master-shot vignettes etched in black and white by cinematographer Tom DiCillo, Stranger Than Paradiseis a nonchalant masterpiece of deadpan comedy and perfectly calibrated minimalism.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- High-definition digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Jim Jarmusch, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary from 1996 featuring Jarmusch and actor Richard Edson
- Permanent Vacation (1980), Jarmusch’s seventy-five-minute, color feature debut, presented in a high-definition digital restoration supervised by the director
- Kino ’84: Jim Jarmusch, a 1984 German television program featuring interviews with cast and crew members from Stranger Than Paradise and Permanent Vacation
- Some Days in January 1984, a behind-the-scenes Super 8 film by Tom Jarmusch
- U.S. and Japanese trailers
- PLUS: A booklet featuring Jarmusch’s 1984 “Some Notes on Stranger Than Paradise,” critics Geoff Andrew and J. Hoberman on Stranger Than Paradise, and author and critic Luc Sante on Permanent Vacation
Cover by Eric Skillman