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Dick Johnson Is Dead

2020

Kirsten Johnson

Documentary, Self: Kirsten Johnson, Dick Johnson

6.6

578

Documentary. Comedy With this inventive portrait, a cameraperson seeks a way to keep her 86-year-old father alive forever. Utilizing moviemaking magic and her family’s dark humor, she celebrates Dr. Dick Johnson’s last years by staging fantasies of death and beyond. Together, dad and daughter confront the great inevitability awaiting us all.

	Author	Review
United States	Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter	"A uniquely wonderful film about family, film, life and death."	POS
United States	Guy Lodge Variety	"[A] richly rewarding, surprising documentary (...) It also doubles as a witty, thoughtful rumination on death itself, the ways we prepare for it (or don’t), and what may or may not come next.	POS
United States	Michelle Jaworski The Daily Dot	"An absolute gift (...) [Its] unconventional filmmaking is a universal story about the joy of celebrating what you have in the here and now (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Jordan Raup The Film Stage	"[It] might be one of the most universal films ever made. Providing levity and comfort to ideas of mortality, Kirsten Johnson has illuminated the sweet embrace of death."	POS
United States	Justin Chang Los Angeles Times	"Is the strangest, most surreally moving of father-daughter love stories. (...) This is a funny film about death, which is to say it’s a wrenching film about life".	POS
United States	Matt Zoller Seitz rogerebert.com	"A filmmaker's fascinating contemplation of her father's mortality, her own, and everyone's. (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Abby Olcese SlashFilm	"[It] is both a poetic act of defiance and a portrait of love at the end of a life."	POS
United States	Eric Kohn IndieWire	"A sharp meditation on death and family bonds."	POS
United States	Jessica Kiang The Playlist	"Kirsten Johnson returns with a witty, bright-eyed Doc."	POS
Canada	Shelagh Rowan-Legg Screen Anarchy	"A loving and honest correspondance between a child and parent, an examination of mortality, a tribute to friendship and care, and a challenge to the documentary form"	POS
United States	K. Austin Collins Rolling Stone	"A masterpiece (...) 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 (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly	"[It is] more than worth watching. What transcends that narrative though isn't just Johnson's bravura style in telling it, but the immeasurable love between its maker and its muse"	POS
United States	Vikram Murthi AV Club	"A sincere attempt to do for her father what she failed to do with her mother. That Johnson mostly pulls this off through the lens of black comedy, without succumbing to outright miserabilism, is an achievement"	POS
United States	Alonso Duralde The Wrap	"By the end, viewers are likely to feel that gallows-humor amusement, and that sadness, not just for Dick but also for anyone we care about. And for ourselves"	POS
United States	Karen Han Polygon	"Deeply personal, [it] will break your heart (...) An incredible work of art (...) An extraordinary work for how easily Kirsten slips between tones without coming off as saccharine or untruthful about what’s unfolding onscreen"	POS
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"This is both an exploratory personal project and a thought-experiment of a film (...) Maybe we are all like Dick Johnson, smilingly going about our business as if death has nothing to do with us (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Keith Watson Slant	"'Dick Johnson Is Dead' isn't a biography of Dick, but rather a reflective self-portrait of Johnson herself (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Dan Kois Slate	"I hope I can find a way to talk with my father as frankly as Kirsten talks to Dick. And I hope that when I'm on my way out, my daughters take me as seriously, and treat me as kindly, as this beautiful movie does its hero"	POS
United States	Matt Goldberg Collider	"What makes 'Dick Johnson Is Dead' a remarkable film is that Johnson uses her art to construct death in order to cope with it (...) [It] is not an easy movie despite its warm tone"	POS

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