Jim Jarmusch Movies, Definitively Ranked

Perhaps Jarmusch’s most hipster-y trait is his tendency to cast cool musicians in his films, something he was doing well before he went on to make a couple of music documentaries. (He’s also directed some music videos and dabbled in music himself.) Yet the most intrusive presence of any musician across his fiction filmography isn’t on screen at all, but Neil Young’s solo squall of guitar that serves as the score to Dead Man. This black-and-white western was largely dismissed by most critics in the mid-90s, though the influential Jonathan Rosenbaum was enthusiastic and eventually wrote a full book on it. With the fullness of time, it’s more difficult to dismiss; this despite the presence of Johnny Depp in drifting-naïf mode as William Blake, an accountant who arrives in a 19th century town to find that his promised job is no longer on offer. Through a series of mishaps, he kills a man in self-defense, is mortally wounded in the process, and winds up traveling the western landscape with an American Indian outcast named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who believes Blake to be a reincarnation of the same-named poet. Blake is essentially already dead (Nobody fails to remove the bullet lodged in his chest), the movie covering his final few days as eludes his pursuers (and commits some more murders, not quite so defensively as before). It’s a gorgeous, sometimes gruesome, grave-march that feels, by design, more fully conclusive than many of Jarmusch’s other, more slice-of-life stories. This one’s a sad slice of death. Oh, and the Young score, apparently improvised over footage of the movie, is roughly one-third poetically striking and two-thirds emphatically annoying. I’m a fan of Young’s and this still may have killed any chance of me watching Year of the Horse, the Young doc Jarmusch released in 1997.

7. Father Mother Sister Brother (2025)

Jarmusch’s latest movie returns to the triptych structure of Mystery Train with some of the playful repetition of elements seen in Coffee and Cigarettes. Like the latter, it’s a celeb-packed affair; in “Father,” the first segment, Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik, performers who otherwise seemed singularly unlikely to share the screen, play siblings visiting their dad, played by Tom Waits. In “Mother,” the siblings are Cate Blanchett and Vickey Krieps, visiting their mother (Charlotte Rampling). And in “Sister Brother,” Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat are siblings reuniting to go through their departed parents’ belongings. Certain motifs—a Rolex watch; overhead shots of coffee and tea; a particular English phrase—recur in ways that might make the film seem like a tossed-off exercise, not unlike those in Cigarettes. These repeated riffs function as mini-hooks, adding some catchy fun to a movie that is principally concerned with capturing the range of sibling relationships, and the awkwardness of adult children paying dutiful visits to parents they hold (or who hold them) at some kind of remove, with quietly devastating accuracy. It’s also smartly structured; that the movie ends on the genuine warmth between Moore and Sabbat goes a long way toward making the whole thing feel bittersweetly observational, rather than a vision of socially awkward hell. As much as Jarmusch may come across as a hipster type, his characters here are utterly recognizable, even normal, despite whatever quirks define and divide them.

6. Paterson (2016)