Jarmusch season (Coffee and Cigarettes, The Dead Don't Die)
By Kit Macdonald
Filmoteca are a couple of films into a mini-Jim Jarmusch season right now, but there's still time to catch two of the American auteur's more recent delights. First up is the absurdist zombie-apocalypse comedy The Dead Don't Die, which brings together almost too many top-drawer names to mention. Iggy Pop, Chloe Sevigny, Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Danny Glover - "the greatest zombie cast ever disassembled" - for a bloody, and bloody funny, romp around the fictitious central Pennsylvania town of Centerville.
Then on Monday, another spectacular ensemble cast come together for Coffee & Cigarettes, which split opinion when it came out in 2003 but has been largely accepted into the public's affections 20 years later. Roberto Benigni, Steve Buscemi, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Steven Wright and Joie Lee are all there, but Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan steal the show with a very on-the-nose skit about an insecure British actor new in Hollywood trying and failing to accurately place a contemporary on the acting hierarchy.