Wim Wenders's 1984 film - Paris, Texas - brings together a good team of actors (notably Henry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell), a great musical score (Ry Cooder!), fantastic cinematography (Robbie Muller - I don't know anything about him), a intelligent and mysterious screenplay (Sam Shepard), and most of all WW's sensibility as a director. Every scene, every frame is like a work of art - no coincidence I guess that I've just read a news item about Gregory Crewdson, who makes terrific photographs staging and designing each one as if it were a movie still; his work and sensibility recalls WW's work. This film brings WW to a new setting for him, and it's obvious how much he's intrigued by the variety of visual landscapes in the SW (and to a degree in LA): ranging from the terrific opening sequence in an arid desert landscape, and then encompassing weird roadside restaurants and motels, then the car-choked streets in the American urbaneia - so many visually memorable moments for this ever-curious director and his team. Is it a great movie, though? Maybe not quite. The story, in essence, is that Stockwell's brother Travis (Stanton) has been missing for 4 years when he suddenly is found at a tiny and sort of scary medical clinic; older bro Walt (Stockwell) leaves LA to bring his brother back to civilization and to the family (he'd left his wife and newborn, Hunter, who has been raised since childhood by Walt and wife, Anne). Good plot set-up - but the plot development strains credibility almost to a laughable extent - probably intentional (for ex., Walt finds his runaway brother just by driving aimlessly on some Texas backroads; similarly, Travis and Hunter, trying to find H's mother, improbably track her down at a bank and follow her through a maze of Houston traffic). OK, so Wenders isn't a director we go to for logical and well-designed plots; the movie also challenges us, however, w/ Travis's almost miraculous awakening as a character, and we never really get a good explanation of what happened to him during his years of exile nor why, initially, he seems so traumatized. All that said, the conclusion is warm and affecting and, thanks to all the other strengths of the film, worth waiting through occasional languor and obscurity.