Only Lovers Left Alive

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

(R)

***

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Jim Jarmusch’s droll new vampire flick might just be“the next great midnight classic,”said Jordan Hoffman in Film.com. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston star as blood-sipping connoisseurs who remain deeply in love after centuries as a couple, but the film is really about artists—or at least artists’ image of themselves as the brilliant, cool, emotionally engaged figures who live on the fringe of society and have to put up with all the normals. Not much happens plotwise, and the film’s archness is “guaranteed to affect some viewers the way garlic affected Bela Lugosi,” said Jonathan Romney in The Observer (U.K.). But Swinton and Hiddleston “have a wit, warmth, and raffish flamboyance that makes them oddly endearing,” and a certain “discerning, literary-minded strain of young Goth” will see them as heroes. Much of the movie’s humor plays off the exquisite retro tastes of its two central immortals, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. But the question that the story raises—“Why do vampires not die of boredom?”—turns out to be a challenge to all of us who ever dreamed of eternal love.