Pictureland

Paterson is everywhere in Jim Jarmusch's twelfth feature film.  There is the title, of course.  It is also the name of the film's bus-driver-by-day-poet-by-night-main character.  The New Jersey City is  the title and subject of the five-volume epic poem by William Carlos Williams, the poet and book(s) mentioned on several occasions in the film.  As Paterson, the man (Adam Driver) walks to and from his bus garage in a warren of old industrial buildings, we see the city name spelled out across some venerable old brick on a clearly visible ghost sign.  The driver's bus flows through the streets of the city as if conveyed through its very blood.  Teem as it might with the real New Jersey City, Jim Jarmusch has, as usual, created a place that is of the world and mainly not.  With this particular piece of work, at this particular time in America, that's not necessarily a bad thing.   Mr. Jarmusch's films often exist in a kind of reverie, but...

A girl does frequently walk home alone at night in Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature.  Sometimes she glides, on a comandeered skateboard, down urban thoroughfares blasted solitary, through ghostly suburban streets.  All of these nocturnal movements taking place in the Iranian nether world called Bad City.   But like so much about Ms. Amirpour's original and assured narrative twisting, the last person whose safety we need worry about in Bad City is the young woman in the striped shirt and flowing chador. The writer and director has apparently described her film as an "Iranian vampire spaghetti western." Such are the cultural mash-ups that emerge from the speech and upbringing of Ana Lily Amirpour.  Her description might sound like a bizarre story pitch, but it's fairly apt.  More unlikely than the concept is how well she makes it work. Like the westerns of Sergio Leone and others, Amirpour has taken an American genre, shaken it up and let it settle on...

"So this is your wilderness...Detroit."  So says Eve to Adam as they drive by night through the moribund Motor City in a white Jaguar.   Only Lovers Left Alive is not, as it happens, an update of the book of Genesis that Jim Jarmusch has overlaid onto the urban wasteland of Detroit.  The action  Only Lovers Left Alive occurs by night, as Adam and Eve are vampires.  While they're not the primeval lovers of the Bible, the names do obviously carry significance.  Mr. Jarmusch's eleventh feature is an elegaic one, lamenting not only the tenuous existence of analog recording, lovely old guitars and other beautiful objects, but the looming loss of our very own paradise of a planet. There would seem a certain inevitability in Detroit if you happen to be a vampire.  What better place to take up residence?  A city built for two million now now home 700,000. It is in significant ways -  figurative and quite literal - a city of night.  Former...