posturing actually becomes an irritant". Of the film's characters, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote that some were "beautifully imagined and realized, while others seem drawn from a more familiar stockpile, designed for reuse rather than discovery". David Denby, concluding a mixed review of the film for New York Magazine, mused that "one feels Jarmusch has pushed hipsterism and cool about as far as they can go, and that isn't nearly far enough." This reproach was echoed by other reviewers who found that the film's style did not stray far from that of the director's earlier work – a critical backlash that would be amplified two years later following the release of Night on Earth (1991). Postmodern cultural critic bell hooks cited the interaction in the Memphis train station between Thomas and the Japanese couple as one of the few examples of nuanced, deconstructive and subversive treatment of blackness in American film. In his original review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert proclaimed that "[t]he best thing about Mystery Train is that it takes you to an America you feel you ought to be able to find for yourself, if you only knew where to look." He later included the movie in his Great Movies collection, comparing the movie favorably to Jarmusch's later efforts like Dead Man and The Limits of Control. In an April 2000 retrospective of Jarmusch's work for Sight & Sound, Shawn Levy concluded that the film was "as much a valentine to the allure of the American way of pop culture as it is a cheeky bit of structural legerdemain without terribly much resonating significance". Footnotes External links Mystery Train at The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page "Communication Breakdown" – an essay on the film from the Bright Lights Film Journal Mystery Train: Memphis Blues Again an essay by Peter Guralnick at the Criterion Collection 1989 films 1989 comedy-drama films 1980s English-language films English-language Japanese films American anthology films American comedy-drama films American independent films Films directed by Jim Jarmusch Films set in hotels Films set in Memphis, Tennessee Films shot in Tennessee 1980s Italian-language films Japanese anthology films Japanese comedy-drama films Japanese independent films 1980s Japanese-language films Rail transport films 1989 multilingual films American multilingual films Japanese multilingual films 1980s American films 1980s Japanese films