Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.
Paris, Texas is a singular, haunting work — Wim Wenders at his most poetic, Robby Müller's cinematography of the American Southwest is among the most beautiful ever committed to film, and Harry Dean Stanton gives a career-defining performance. The script by Sam Shepard is elliptical and deeply felt, with the peep-show reunion scene among the most emotionally devastating in cinema. Novelty is genuinely high: its tone, pace, and emotional register are utterly distinctive — a European gaze on American mythology that no one else has replicated. The ending, while thematically coherent and quietly devastating, is the one area where the film's deliberate restraint tips slightly into emotional withholding rather than resolution, leaving it just below the transcendent standard of the rest of the film.