a review of 离魂异客

Not really what I was expecting at all. Taken apart, it's a lot like Jarmusch's other films before and since: A series of character vignettes with a very slight narrative throughline, as we follow Depp's failed account-turned-reluctant gunslinger taking a slow, passive tumble into perfidy, shepherded along his path by Gary Farmer's "Nobody." This one comes the closest to pure nihilism of anything in his body of work. Almost none of the characters that we meet, or anything that happens to them, really matters in the end.