Dick Johnson Is Dead
Netflix | Release Date (Streaming): October 2, 2020 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
89
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 28 Critic Reviews
Positive:
28
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsOct 8, 2020
For all its playfulness, it’s the real, stinging, joyful, inconvenient reality of life that Dick Johnson Is Dead gives us. It’s a committed act of preservation: a looping, reeling, repeatable act of love. Read full review
100
VoxAlissa WilkinsonOct 7, 2020
Dick Johnson Is Dead suggests that learning to confront reminders of death, to even conjure them for yourself and examine them closely, takes some of the sting out of death and replaces it with love. To love someone is to accept that one day, death will part the two of you. The pain of knowing that is built into the act of loving. But we go on loving anyway. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangOct 1, 2020
This is a funny film about death, which is to say it’s a wrenching film about life. Read full review
100
The Associated PressJake CoyleOct 1, 2020
I’m sure for Johnson, Dick Johnson Is Dead will one day be a heaven-sent reservoir for remembering her father. But its larger gift is in spurring us all to meet mortality with humor and honesty, and appreciate loved ones while they’re here. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisOct 1, 2020
Pitched artfully between the celebratory and the elegiac, it is an inarguably serious documentary with light, surrealistic flourishes that, at times, veer into exuberant goofiness. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyJan 26, 2020
Dick Johnson Is Dead is a funny, touching and, to be sure, unique film, and the Johnsons are a very fortunate father and daughter Read full review
95
PolygonKaren HanOct 7, 2020
Dick Johnson Is Dead is the best reminder possible to cherish your loved ones while they’re still living — to take that extra photo or video as something to hang onto once they’re gone. Read full review
91
UproxxVince ManciniOct 8, 2020
Through its personal approach and creative structure, Dick Johnson Is Dead manages to make reckoning with a loved one’s mortality not just entertaining, but oddly uplifting. The empathy and humanity it applies to death make it, above all else, life-affirming. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattSep 30, 2020
Like a sturdier Mr. Rogers who just happens to prefer red anoraks to cardigans, Dick comes off as both a kind of holy sage and an extremely good sport — a man whose gentle, pure-hearted exuberance swells to fill nearly every frame. Read full review
91
The Film StageJordan RaupJan 28, 2020
Providing levity and comfort to ideas of mortality, Kirsten Johnson has illuminated the sweet embrace of death. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnJan 26, 2020
Oscillating from intimate father-daughter exchanges to surreal meta-fictional tangents, the movie lives within its riveting paradox, reflecting the queasy uncertainty surrounding its subject’s fate. Read full review
90
SlashfilmAbby OlceseMar 26, 2020
Dick Johnson is Dead is both a poetic act of defiance and a portrait of love at the end of a life. Read full review
90
VarietyGuy LodgeJan 26, 2020
At once a celebration and a lament, simultaneously jubilant and ineffably sad, it’s a film worth sticking around to see. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzOct 2, 2020
Maybe Dick Johnson is Dead is the filmmaking equivalent of the band on the deck of the Titanic playing their hearts out while the water rises. If so, the movie is aware that it might be that thing, and seems content to be that thing. That's every movie, every story. When the end is preordained, you might as well make music. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenSep 28, 2020
Works of art like these are more than creative endeavors. They function more as testaments: to the lives of their subjects, to the awfulness of death, and to the inspired ways we cling to the former, even in the face of the latter. Read full review
85
The AtlanticDavid SimsOct 5, 2020
For all its eerie focus on the end of our lives, that’s what Johnson’s movie is about: celebrating the people we love. Read full review
83
The PlaylistJessica KiangJan 26, 2020
It’s when Johnson strays from strict adherence to the concept that the most profound insights come. Read full review
80
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeOct 3, 2020
For all its clear-eyed representation of the fears and horrors of aging, Dick Johnson Is Dead is nonetheless an ultimately joyous experience. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawOct 2, 2020
It all builds up to a remarkable coup de cinéma: a Buñuelian finale that is startling and moving. This is both an exploratory personal project and a thought-experiment of a film. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekOct 2, 2020
Johnson and her father share a sense of humor, and the bond between them informs the finest moments of Dick Johnson Is Dead. Yet I can’t stop thinking about the friend crying, alone, in the church, so verklempt he forgot he was in a movie — one place where this documentary’s joyful dark humor isn’t as amusing as it should be. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternOct 1, 2020
As a piece of entertainment, Ms. Johnson’s documentary is exuberant, to say the least, and instructive in the bargain. Read full review
80
SlateDan KoisSep 30, 2020
The result is a movie that’s sad, but not at all unbearable — in fact, that’s oddly inspiring. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrSep 30, 2020
If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadaySep 30, 2020
Plenty of movies are wish-fulfillment fantasies, but Kirsten Johnson has created a first: a dread-fulfillment fantasy that brims with love, humor and, of all things, life. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonSep 30, 2020
Ultimately is less a horror film than a valentine, from a daughter to a father, and a sweet portrait of a man going gently into that good night. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubVikram MurthiSep 30, 2020
That Johnson mostly pulls this off through the lens of black comedy, without succumbing to outright miserabilism, is an achievement. May we all have the opportunity to be present at our own funerals, surrounded by loved ones, before it’s too late. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzSep 28, 2020
You’re unlikely to any time soon encounter a more thorough and energetic dive into the art of letting go. I look forward to Johnson’s next act, whilst I look over my shoulder. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineKeith WatsonSep 28, 2020
Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice. Read full review
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