Critics reviews

It’s typically chill and even low-key, as one might expect from a filmmaker who amusingly kept his shades on even while accepting the Golden Lion at Venice, yet a touching vulnerability settles in, shedding the arch deadpan associated with many of his movies.

In both writing and performance, the relationships painfully translate as unnatural when their genuineness is what these stories so desperately crave.

Those who love the earlier work will allow the artist to riff with ideas they might not have the time or resources to fully realize––essentially giving the benefit of the doubt... Father Mother Sister Brother might make some cringe, but it fits the criteria. I’m happy it exists.

With Father Mother Sister Brother, Jarmusch offers a fairly more accessible and commercial film than some of his prior works, blending moments of comedy with subtle dramatic subtexts to offer an entertaining, if a bit slight and forgettable, film.

After the relative crowd pleasers “Paterson” (2016; wistful, gently comic) and “The Dead Don’t Die” (2019; undead horror filtered through a cultural “get off my lawn” manifesto), this sees Jarmusch going into difficult mode. It’s rewarding, nonetheless.

[A] film that sneaks up on you with the humanity of its subjects, the subtle yet effective humor that permeates most scenes, and the familiarity of its characters’ imperfect familiar relationships. It’s a cynical, pessimistic film, but not a hopeless one.

[W]ith his new one, a deeply pleasing and gently quietist triptych on the subject of family, he [Jim Jarmusch] is giving us something new and personal.

Jim Jarmusch has been doing his idiosyncratic thing for so long we sometimes take him for granted. But then he comes along with a film as delicate and lovely, as singular and perfectly realized as Father Mother Sister Brother and quietly floors you.

“Father Mother Sister Brother” is about as dry as a physical copy of short stories you’ve loved since you were a child. There are no protagonists or antagonists, just people moving through life, Jarmusch catching moments of them the way that David Lynch once caught ideas like fish moving down a stream. This is a movie Lynch would’ve admired, brittly funny and content to linger in doorways and thresholds for as long as it takes until somebody breaks the awkward silence.

“Father Mother Sister Brother” is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening. Yet, alert to the way dead air between family members can actually be teeming with life, each segment is beguilingly immersive from the first shot.

The film, in other words, feels like a more tonally cohesive “Coffee and Cigarettes,” shot in one contained stretch rather than pieced together from shorts made over a decade. And as with that earlier anthology — as with any anthology — some vignettes land more forcefully than others.

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother finds the director in a minor key, which is sometimes his best key... How far he’s come from the days of Down by Law (1986). And yet, he’s still Jim Jarmusch.