Paris, Texas

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

Broadly embraced as a slow-burning, emotionally devastating portrait of American estrangement, Wim Wenders' film has aged into a cult landmark — though even at release, a minority of critics found it inert and overlong. The divide tends to fall on whether the film's deliberate quietude reads as profound restraint or as lifelessness, and whether Nastassja Kinski's casting serves or undermines the climactic scenes.