Stranger Than Paradise Tokyo Story

Jim Jarmusch presents his breakthrough film, Stanger Than Paradise, with Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu's austere classic, Tokyo Story.

"Ozu is a classical master and one of my favorite film directors. His simplicity and the purity of his style continue to be a big inspiration to me"--Jim Jarmusch

Jarmusch's breakthrough film, Stranger Than Paradise, won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes and established him as an innovative master of American independent film. Noted for its minimal approach--its use of long takes, for example--this film of three vignettes follows the lives of two hapless losers shaken from their inertia by the arrival of Eva, a 16-year-old cousin from Hungary. She leads the young men from New York City to the frozen shores of Cleveland's Lake Erie, and then to a more paradisiacal Florida. With John Lurie, Richard Edson, Eszter Balint. (1984; 89 mins.)

In Tokyo Story, an elderly couple travels to Tokyo where they are greeted less than enthusiastically by their grown children and shunted from one family to the next. Ozu's tale is a devastating vision of alienation in the modern world told with heartbreaking formal directness: minimal camera movement and restrained, resonant editing. (1953; 134 mins.)