Here's A thought for you: imagine the sound of one hand clapping along to the bongo-drum beat of nothingness. In other words, nothing new for uber-hipster, Jim Jarmusch, also one third of a trinity (Coppola, Anderson) currently spearheading the happysad Bill Murray revisionist movement. Murray fails to make an appearance in Down By Law, but if it's any consolation, you still have the innocuously grizzly Tom Waits doing his thing – joined by pretty-boy mobster, John Lurie, and the perpetually-confused Roberto Benigni, they play a group of convicts on the run, after having escaped from a New Orleans prison.

Ostensibly, what you have is a comic haiku penned with the differing personality shades of the three leads. But it took Dead Man's willingness to get its feet dirty – stepping into the trenchant, bloodied soil of White-American/Indian relations – to make me realise that Jarmusch's focal point has always been the literal and figural American landscape: here, the hollow thud of a lack of self-certainty arises not from rootlessness but from a perpetual sameness, the punchline being that freedom and its counterpart become just about interchangeable once the three attempt to navigate a marshland that's continually folding back on itself. Meanwhile, Benigni's Italian-immigrant-cum-fission-bomb turns mainstream venacular into putty, casually aborting language fixtures with a panache that would make Ms. Drake weep, before an empty stomach sends him careening into whole-ness. It's the escape movie channeled through Beckett, percolated in cool blacks-and-whites, coursing with a sense of the primal meets the inane. It's also essentially vacuous and vacuously essential – meaning spiritual disenfranchisement has rarely been this cool.—David Levinson

» Jim Jarmusch | USA | 1986