Anyone who's ever seen a film by New York indie auteur Jim Jarmusch knows that the director's work is an acquired taste. With his minimalist, deadpan sense of humor, his fixation on crossed signals and miscommunication, and that curious blend of existentialist angst and laconic cool intercut with moments of sheer poetic beauty, it's a style that has seduced as many viewers as it's bewildered.
Jarmusch has always been Jarmusch, though, a consistently singular filmmaker, gnawing on the same obsessions for three decades now, and with a handful of America's best post-1970s films to his credit ("Down By Law," "Mystery Train," "Ghost Dog").
If 2005's "Broken Flowers" represented a pinnacle of sorts — with a Zenned-out Bill Murray as the ultimate Jarmusch protagonist — it also represented the most perfect distillation of his style to date, and hence, an ending of sorts.