Jim Jarmusch Movies, Definitively Ranked

At a recent New York Film Festival press conference following a screening of his new movie Father Mother Sister Brother, writer-director Jim Jarmusch described his creative process as the gathering of small ideas. This is evident in Father Mother Sister Brother, which is essentially composed of three lengthy unrelated scenes with some common elements playfully woven together, and it’s evident in Jarmusch’s filmography as a whole, which features a whole lot of variations on a theme. That’s true of many filmmakers, but Jarmusch doesn’t dress up that tendency in elaborate plotting or stylish pyrotechnics. His work often starts with a handful of characters in a specific location, then will switch, after 30 minutes or so, to a new set of characters in the same location (like the Memphis wanderers of Mystery Train), or those previous characters in a new location (like the cellmates of Down by Law), or to new characters and locations that nonetheless share some elements in common with the others (like the various taxi drivers and passengers of Night on Earth). Coffee and cigarettes are often involved, even before he made a movie called Coffee and Cigarettes, a compilation of shorts he had been accumulating for years.