Critics reviews

The film is a study in shared melancholy, of facing forever, and whether holding hands while it happens makes it any less intolerable. Jarmusch ultimately finds creativity, the product of human imagination, to be reason enough to face any indignation and hardship. And furthermore, that sharing the delight one finds listening to the perfect song, or watching a perfect movie such as this, is the most rapturous pleasure life can offer. Reason to live as many lifetimes as one is handed.

Like all Jarmusch films, Only Lovers Left Alive is very funny, with numerous allusive puns and terrific exchanges that follow from the indulgence of urges... the charms of Jim Jarmusch's funny, sexy, and elegiac vampire movie speak for themselves.

Only Lovers Left Alive is Top 5 Jim Jarmusch for sure; a long, warm bath in sensuality, with flashes of Wong-Kar Wai amid the ennui. In its deliberate slowness, it also ends up feeling like a requiem for 20th century film storytelling, and for the pre-digital world.

Unlike most other vampire movies, with their focus on sex and violence, Only Lovers Left Alive is about elemental processes: deep time, the longue durée (the film opens with stars and galaxies billions of light years away), and the dubious privilege of mapping biology onto the coordinates of physics.

One of the things Jarmusch achieves so remarkably in OLLA is the creation of a palpable sense of time, not in the usual avant-garde mode of meditative stasis but instead as a kind of hypnotic, humming longeur. Adam and Eve are in a kind of opium den of intellection; they are the last stand of swoony aestheticism in an age governed by use value. In this respect, Jarmusch is providing a loving portrait of his ideal audience.

This is easily Jarmusch's bleakest film since Dead Man (1996), and it's no less obsessed by atrocities carried out in the name of industrial progress (in this case, worldwide ecological devastation). Yet it's also one of his most visually expressive films, playing out amid ravishing nocturnal imagery that fits perfectly with the dark romantic tone.

Like the culture they fed on for centuries, simultaneously "holy" and grandiose but also parasitic and bent, Adam and Eve are glamorous and useless characters, wallowing in their own hip irrelevance. But there is an elegance to them that is undeniable, rendered all the more palpable by Jarmusch's look: aloof, passionately detached and antiquatedly youthful.

This movie hooks you with its druggy, buzzy late-night vibe rather than with its story: It's about Hiddleston in a vintage muscle car (help, please – it's something strange that I couldn't identify) rolling through the abandoned streets of the Motor City, and Swinton as a pallid ghost drifting through the alleyways of the Arab souk while men hiss at her, "I have what you need.

Jarmusch, the aging ambassador of cool who made Dead Man andThe Limits Of Control, is known for draining genre scenarios of action and incident. But he's crafted something truly special this time out: a funny, deeply romantic hangout movie that treats art not just as a reason to live, but also as a rejuvenating force in a relationship.

The power, the delight, and the pitfall of "Only Lovers Left Alive" is its creation of a grand artistic mythology in which Jarmusch himself assumes his place. The script is so clever that it nearly puts over a sensibility that seems petrified in nostalgia and closed in among its personal archives.

I consider it the best film that Jarmusch has ever made... It's romantic, and not devoid of a certain crucial negativity (there's a reason that vampires only go out at night). But it pulls back from the extremity of youthful romanticism, as Adam's morbidity is tempered by Eve's pragmatism as a survivor.

The whole film swirls just like that music: 45s spin on turntables, the stars revolve in the heavens, the camera floats over Swinton as she spins like a stoned dervish. It makes for one of the most enjoyable and artful pieces of cinematic dandyism in the Jarmusch catalog, and for all its poised flipness, one of the saddest and most serious.