Jim Jarmusch
1986

What I like about Jarmusch is that he throws together these people who don't even seem to come from the same world and then throws them all together and they just talk. (Best example: GZA and RZA meet Bill Murray in Coffee & Cigarettes.)
The weird part is how totally similar the Waits and Lurie characters are. One's named Jack and one's name Zack; the Benigni character is constantly mixing them up. The opening sequence shows them mirroring each other right away. Both are with a woman who's in bed and pretends to be asleep and then opens her eyes as the music comes back in. The way the camera moves across town makes them seem to be somehow connected. Also, then each woman basically gives a (fairly stagey, in both cases) monologue about how stupid the guy is. Plus they exchange jackets and head down symmetrical paths at the end.
I love to look at Jarmusch movies. There's something so clean about the black and white cinematography and so unique about his eye that everything looks a little otherworldly. I could watch the camera pan across the buildings to transition from Jack to Zack in the opening sequences all day.
The scene where Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni and John Lurie start dancing around their jail cell chanting "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!" is one of my new favourites ever.
Lurie starred and did the soundtrack, which was spare and jazzy. And it opens and closes with Tom Waits songs. So for music, Down By Law gets A+.
The actual movie gets somewhere around a B. I liked the first probably two-thirds, but the last part (basically everything following the jailbreak) was touch-and-go for me. (Though it was hilarious when they found the cabin that looked exactly like their jail cell.) It might have been because I was dog-tired but whatever.