Critics reviews

The guitar score from Ry Cooder is haunting. The panoramic vistas from cinematographer Robby Müller are as breathtaking as any John Ford western... While the naturalistic performances and deft narrative structure make this easily the strongest movie in the career of the director, Wim Wenders.

Paris, Texas is a beautiful-looking, beautiful-sounding film... It is an eerie, sad story whose meaning disappears over the vast horizon as if on a highway heading away through the desert.

It’s incredibly moving, and a great example of how extreme stylization and artifice can be combined with pure, genuine feeling. That combination is so strange and so paradoxical, and every time I see the film I surrender to it. It’s one of those films you can watch again and again and it will always be young. I guess that’s what a masterpiece is.

Stanton, at the moment that he was ready to soar, was weighed down with an iconography that was neither his own nor as rich as the inner life that he pressed into its service. The best thing about "Paris, Texas" is the simple fact that Stanton is front and center throughout. But the role reduced him rather than filling him out, turning him into an icon rather than a performer.

If you have any feeling for film, the first few shots of Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984) will take you captive... The helicopter perspective in Paris, Texas would be entirely regal if the camera didn't gently list from one side to the other. The whole movie is in that initial shot: continental scale and human frailty.

Debuting at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984, where it deservedly won the Palme d'Or, the film achieved the German director's long sought fusion of the European personal film with classic American cinema's preoccupations with male identity, the frontier and the ideology of romance.

Falling for Paris, Texas depends on accepting it on its mythopoetic terms, and forgiving it its dramatic failures. The film is most satisfying, most moving, when it’s at its most narratively vague: There’s more power in its sightseeing, in its cultural tourism, than there is in the therapy session to which it belatedly amounts.

No wonder the Houston of Wenders's movie (shot by his frequent cinematographer Robby Müller) seems so dream-like — a sanitized assemblage of concrete and limestone car parks; of banks and hotels veiled in shiny reflective glass; of neon-lit interiors that shimmer as if otherworldly. The streets are empty. We hear only the occasional whoosh of a passing car. In Wenders's vision of the American metropolis, Houston is utopia and uchronia, a city that defies place and time.

There are some films that express their story with such deft skill and emotional charge that they remain with you after the credits roll... [Wenders] allows Paris, Texas to unfurl with such assured calm that each delicate narrative revelation, no matter how trivial or terrible, seems a natural and almost obvious progression.

The middle section, depicting the slow reparation of Travis and Hunter's severed bond, comes thrillingly close to perfection, with the progress of their relationship echoed visually by their surroundings as they travel from L.A. to the director's beloved forgotten America. And then, just when I was ready to surrender my heart completely, it suddenly turns into a fucking Sam Shepard play.

Paris, Texas is one of the most fully realized and exhilarating examples of this break [from the past]—which is ironic because it has none of the political ambitions of Oberhausen, and because it comes at the very end of the New German Cinema's shelf life. Indeed, by the time he shot it, Wenders had moved a long way from Oberhausen, having already made two films in the United States.

[It] evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn't—that can't—exist.