The Village Voice presented the U.S. premiere of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and joined the New York Film Festival in presenting “An Evening With Adam Driver” featuring a conversation with the festival’s director Kent Jones. The past year has been big for Driver — from his turn as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens to his roles in Midnight Special, Girls, and now, Paterson. The chat on Sunday night ranged from those performances to his upcoming part in Silence.
Of course, not every movie at the festival is about the past. One of the best is Jim Jarmusch’s masterful Paterson, centering on a New Jersey bus driver and poet played by Adam Driver, which finds beauty in the rhythms of the everyday. But maybe this, too, harks back to the past in subtle ways: The film’s austerity and its pointedly undramatic narrative reminded me of Jarmusch’s early work. — Bilge Ebiri