I Was on Mars

It's taken a few years for them to gestate, but Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise has fathered a brood of low-budget Euro-movies about the trials and tribulations of foreigners newly arrived in New York. This is one of them: a relentlessly in-your-face tragi-comedy about a young woman from Warsaw who speaks no English and loses the few greenbacks she has to the first guy she meets, a loud-suited spiv. Levi himself plays the conman as a sleazeball who takes the bit-players in GoodFellas as role models; co-writer Maria Schrader plays the Polish girl as dogged perseverance personified. Sometimes raucous, sometimes forlorn, but very rarely convincing.