France/West Germany/1984/148 minutes/12A. Dir: Wim Wenders. With Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Natassja Kinski.

The taciturn Travis stumbles out of the desert and back into the lives of the people he abandoned 4 years earlier. He realises that he will never find peace unless he apologises to his wife Jane, whom he so mistreated.

Sublimely photographed by Robbie Muller and scored by Ry Cooder, this is a film about the natural and the artificial, the wild and the domestic, the individual and the family. A universally-acclaimed masterpiece of contemporary cinema, Wenders again found himself on the borders of experience, finally achieving an unprecedented declaration of the heart.

"Enigmatic and fascinating" ***** - Empire