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...

Poor kids.  Whatever admonishment they might have received about  VD in their time- indeterminate heath or sex ed. classes couldn't have prepared them for this.  The "It" which trails the unfortunate young people in It Follows might find its eventual victims through the congress of young fluid and flesh, but it's far more nasty and persistent than a case of the clap.  Ironically, the only hope - and this is one of many things about It Follows which is less than clear - of ridding oneself of the ghost of hookups past is to have sex with someone else and pass "It" on.  Thus, the walk of shame becomes the sprint, the desperate bike ride, the speeding car ride of terror.  And yet..."It" does inexorably follow.  Pick those partners carefully young lovers. With its placid suburban point of origin and sonic pressure gauge of blaring synthesizers, It Follows pays a good bit of homage to John Carpenter.  As with Carpenter's Halloween, only the ...

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...