Editing Stranger Than Paradise (section)

===Critics===
{{Rotten Tomatoes prose|96|7.7|28|A striking debut for director Jim Jarmusch, ''Stranger Than Paradise'' is an effortlessly cool exploration of finding meaning in the mundane.|ref=yes|access-date=July 2, 2023}}

Film critic [[Pauline Kael]] gave the film a generally positive review:
{{blockquote|The first section is set in the bare [[Lower East Side]] apartment of Willie, who is forced to take in Eva, his 16-year-old cousin from Budapest, for ten days. The joke here is the basic joke of the whole movie. It's in what Willie doesn't do: he doesn't offer her food or drink, or ask her any questions about life in Hungary or her trip; he doesn't offer to show her the city, or even supply her with sheets for her bed. Then Eddie comes in, even further down on the lumpen scale. Willie bets on the horses; Eddie bets on dog races. Eva, who never gets to see more of New York than the drab, anonymous looking area where Willie lives, goes off to [[Cleveland]] to stay with Aunt Lotte and work at a [[hot-dog]] stand. And when Willie and Eddie go to see her, all they see is an icy wasteland – slums and desolation – and Eddie says 'You know it's funny. You come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same.' The film has something of the same bombed-out listlessness as [[Paul Morrissey]]'s 1970 ''[[Trash (1970 film)|Trash]]'' – it's ''Trash'' without sex or [[transvestism]]. The images are so emptied out that Jarmusch makes you notice every tiny, grungy detail. And those black-outs have something of the effect of [[Samuel Beckett]]'s pauses: they make us look more intently, as Beckett makes us listen more intently.<ref name="kael" />}}