"Coffee and Cigarettes"

Although these vignettes are unified visually -- they're all in black-and-white and they all have the same gorgeous, silky visual texture -- they were shot by several different cinematographers (Frederick Elmes, Ellen Kuras, Robby Müller and Tom Di Cillo). The resulting movies are similar in mood but visually distinct. Each one takes place in a different coffee shop, usually matched in some way to the characters featured: We see the White Stripes' Jack and Meg White, for instance, in a low-key hipster joint; Waits and Pop slouch in the banquettes of a sleepy, '50s-retro cafe.

The only problem with stringing 11 short films into one work is that the weaker ones recede from memory almost immediately. In "Twins," Cinqué Lee and Joie Lee -- both actors, writers and directors and siblings of Spike -- engage in some blasé Elvis-bashing in a Memphis cafe, and it feels like a tired stunt. But Jarmusch is also able to hit some moments of great humor and beauty: In "Cousins?" an anxiously friendly Alfred Molina tries to tell comedian and actor Steve Coogan (of "24-Hour Party People") that he's done some genealogical research that proves the two of them are related. Coogan responds with little more than a thin smile and a set of condescending remarks about Americans, until he realizes that Molina is friends with Spike Jonze, after which he tries to ooze back into the actor's good graces. The piece is a funny, cockeyed version of the way we think actors behave with each other, although it probably holds more than a few grains of truth.

The most touching vignette is the last one, "Champagne," which features two 60-ish fixtures of downtown New York, actor, director and writer Bill Rice and stage actor and writer Taylor Mead. The two are having a coffee break in the building where they work, although it's not clear what kind of work they do -- they're crouched at a simple table in what appears to be a basement. Mead mentions that he "feels" like the Gustav Mahler song "I Have Lost Track of the World." The two of them hear the music playing faintly around them, or maybe they're just hearing it simultaneously in their heads. Mead perks up and announces that he wants to pretend his coffee cup holds champagne -- he wants to toast all the good things in life, and even great things he missed, like Paris in the '20s. Rice prefers to accept that his coffee is just good, working man's coffee, but eventually he agrees to the toast, holding his cup aloft to New York in the late '70s.

The men don't do anything as obvious as reminisce. They bump against each other with their slight grumpiness, but it seems to us that they're people who have known each other for years, that they're linked by shared memories of some fabulous time and place. Their current circumstances aren't particularly glamorous, but there's an air of glamour about them that their surroundings can't diminish. "Champagne" is a fitting nightcap for "Coffee and Cigarettes." It captures the way small, seemingly insignificant conversations can have the zing of champagne, even when the beverage of choice is really just coffee in a paper cup.

• View blog reactions