Dead Man

Miramax Films | Release Date: May 10, 1996

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

62	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 20 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Rita Kempley

Bad movies have a way of writing their own epitaphs. Read full review

Marc Savlov

It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, just one that grabs your attention and then lets it go, time and time again. Read full review

Roger Ebert

Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning. Read full review

James Berardinelli

Filmed in black-and-white with an eerie score by Neil Young, and using contemporary dialogue and mannerisms, Jarmusch's picture has a dream-like quality. Read full review

Edward Guthmann

Dead Man plays a lot of cards at the same time, and Jarmusch occasionally loses his rhythm when he allows his actors their improvisational riffs. Read full review

Barbara Shulgasser

Particularly because unlike so many other boring movies one sees, Jarmusch films require many more words to explain the boringness than less certifiably artistic films would. Read full review

Stephen Holden

The film's energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness. Read full review

Desson Thomson

After a promising beginning and an amusing middle, the movie gets stuck in limbo. Read full review

100

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Jarmusch has said that the film's odd, generally slow rhythm -- hypnotic if you're captivated by it, as I am, and probably unendurable if you're not--was influenced by classical Japanese period movies by Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa. Read full review

Maria Schneider

Jarmusch's trademark quiet irony, affinity for the outcast and oddball, and moonscape visuals suit the Western genre well. Read full review

EmpireBob McCabe

It's a tale that subtly reinterprets the genre and delivers Jarmusch's most accomplished, if not necessarily his most accessible film to date. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

The film has barely started, and already we can tell what we're in for -- two hours of metaphysical drift. Read full review

Jack Mathews

Its characters are as entertainingly quirky as any he's given us before, and his familiar themes -- strangers in a strange land, lives reformed by chance encounters -- are played out with much higher stakes and with greater purpose. Read full review

100

TV Guide MagazineJacob Levich

A slow-paced but hypnotically absorbing movie, it's buoyed by Jarmusch's trademark off-key humor and embellished throughout by an electrifying instrumental score, courtesy of Neil Young. Read full review

Mike Clark

Coy to a fault, the movie collapses under its own weight with 90 minutes to go, despite Robby Muller's impressive black-and-white photography, which puts the film on a higher artistic plane than other equally unbearable movies. [16 May 1996, Pg.06.D]

David Ansen

The mordant, deadpan humor that streaks through Dead Man is echt Jarmusch, but it's in the service of his most mysterious and deeply felt movie, a meditation on death and transfiguration that, by the end, has thrown off the protective veil of irony. [03 Jun 1996, Pg.75]

Stanley Kauffmann

Come back, Jim Jarmusch. Come back to the pungency of your first films. Leave the 1970s. Come back to the future. [03 Jun 1996, Pg.30]

Todd McCarthy

Like his previous efforts, Jarmusch's sidelong take on Western conventions relies upon quirky tone, hipsterish performances and a highly refined visual style to put it over. Read full review

100

Zach Campbell

Dead Man is likely Jim Jarmusch’s most stunning achievement. Read full review

Michael Wilmington

Watching this movie has an almost hypnotic effect, like being carried along on a river past terrains both familiar and inexplicably, maddeningly odd. Read full review