Director: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston
It seems only natural that it would take a Jim Jarmusch to make vampires seem even remotely cool again. Almost a decade after the Twilight series made vampires the go-to means of channeling the danger of teenage sexuality into a safer, schmoopier form of romanticism, and helped make vampires so ubiquitous in pop culture that any allure was slowly leached out of them, Only Lovers Left Alive comes along to show that it's possible to return the luster to our favorite breed of brooding fiends. Starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as a pair of vampires who have lived for centuries as observers and spent that time collecting knowledge and art while lamenting the ways that human beings don't quite appreciate what they have, Only Lovers has more in common with Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire than with most other vampire movies, and exists on atmosphere more than on plot (though a plot finds it eventually). But what a beautiful, dreamy, hypnotic atmosphere it is.
