In collaborating with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard and blues musician Ry Cooder, whose soulful, improvised steel guitar licks so perfectly reflect the images on screen, Wenders is able to seamlessly transplant the deep introspection and anti-narrative tendencies that drove his German films in the 1970s to the U.S. without looking like a European trying to “do American.” It is not surprising, then, that Paris, Texas (which won the Palme d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival) is one of his best films, a stirring portrait of people striving against their disconnect that resists simple answers even as it rewards our emotional investment. (DVD)