Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1PlayTime (1967)PlayTime (1967) 7.8/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 13, 1967Jacques Tati built a whole glass-and-steel Paris for this film, a set with its own power plant, then filled it with jokes so small and so far from the camera that you miss half of them the first time. Dialogue is reduced to background murmur, Monsieur Hulot drifts in and out as one figure among…0
  2. 2Being There (1979)Being There (1979) 7.9/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 19, 1979Peter Sellers plays Chance, a gardener whose knowledge of the world comes entirely from television, and he plays him with total, unblinking sincerity. Washington's powerful mistake his remarks about the garden for deep wisdom, and the film never nudges you to laugh: it lets each misunderstanding…0
  3. 3Stranger Than Paradise (1984)Stranger Than Paradise (1984) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Oct 1, 1984The film that set the template for American indie deadpan. Jim Jarmusch shot each scene in a single long take with no standard coverage and cut between them with stretches of black screen, so every joke arrives, hangs in the air and then vanishes into darkness. Three bored people drift from New…0
  4. 4Rushmore (1998)Rushmore (1998) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 11, 1998Jason Schwartzman, in his film debut, plays Max Fischer, a 15-year-old scholarship student at a prestigious academy who announces his absurd schemes in the solemn tone of a company chairman. Bill Murray, as a lonely industrialist, answers him with a hangdog stillness that became his signature in…0
  5. 5Kikujiro (1999)Kikujiro (1999) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 5, 1999Takeshi Kitano directs himself as Kikujiro, an idle former yakuza sent to escort a young boy who is searching for his mother during the summer vacation. Kitano's face barely moves, and much of the comedy comes from that impassive stare meeting a child's long, aimless summer days. Gags are staged…0
  6. 6Ghost World (2001)Ghost World (2001) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 20, 2001Thora Birch's Enid meets the empty summer after high school graduation with a stare so flat it becomes a weapon, and Scarlett Johansson's Rebecca matches her shrug for shrug. Steve Buscemi, as the lonely record collector Seymour, gives the film its sad, dry center. Based on Daniel Clowes's comic,…0
  7. 7Whisky (2004)Whisky (2004) 7.1/10 on IMDbReleased Aug 6, 2004Jacobo owns a struggling sock factory in Uruguay, and when his brother comes to visit, he asks his employee Marta to pretend to be his wife. That is the whole setup, and directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll play it with almost no expression at all, building the film from repeated routines…0
  8. 8Napoleon Dynamite (2004)Napoleon Dynamite (2004) 7.0/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 11, 2004Jon Heder's Napoleon speaks in exasperated mumbles, and the film around him is just as unhurried: rural Idaho, static shots and characters who treat a high school class presidency campaign with total seriousness. Made for about $400,000 and filmed at Preston High School and around Franklin County,…0
  9. 9Broken Flowers (2005)Broken Flowers (2005) 7.1/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 31, 2005Bill Murray's Don Johnston receives an anonymous letter saying he has a son, then sets off to visit former girlfriends played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton. Murray barely changes expression from house to house, and Jim Jarmusch lets each awkward reunion run on in…0
  10. 1012:08 East of Bucharest (2006)12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 29, 2006Sixteen years after the 1989 revolution, a small Romanian town's local TV station puts on a call-in talk show to settle one question: did the town take part in the revolution at all? Roughly half the film is that broadcast, played out in a one-camera studio, as guests contradict each other and…0