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- 2020
- PG-13
- The Criterion Collection
- 1 h 29 m
- 2020
- PG-13
- The Criterion Collection
- 1 h 29 m
Summary A lifetime of making documentaries has convinced the award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson of the power of the real. But now she's ready to use every escapist movie-making trick in the book - staging inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die while hoping that cinema might help her bend time, laugh at...
Directed By: Kirsten Johnson
Written By: Nels Bangerter, Kirsten Johnson
- 2020
- PG-13
- The Criterion Collection
- 1 h 29 m
- 2020
- PG-13
- The Criterion Collection
- 1 h 29 m
Dick Johnson Is Dead
7.3
Where to Watch
Summary A lifetime of making documentaries has convinced the award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson of the power of the real. But now she's ready to use every escapist movie-making trick in the book - staging inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die while hoping that cinema might help her bend time, laugh at...
Directed By: Kirsten Johnson
Written By: Nels Bangerter, Kirsten Johnson
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 28 Critic Reviews
89
100% Positive
28 Reviews
28 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 28 Critic Reviews
89
100% Positive
28 Reviews
28 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
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.
Dick Johnson Is Dead is a funny, touching and, to be sure, unique film, and the Johnsons are a very fortunate father and daughter
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 45 User Ratings
7.3
78% Positive
35 Ratings
35 Ratings
13% Mixed
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
9% Negative
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 45 User Ratings
7.3
78% Positive
35 Ratings
35 Ratings
13% Mixed
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
9% Negative
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
Pure in every sense of the word. As much as I like the subject of this documentary, I've come to love the man and woman behind it even more.
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Have you ever thought what day or how you will die? An emotional semi-documentary of an exemplary father and beloved member of his community, mixing elements of nostalgia as well as humor and melancholy. To see with pleasure a weekend afternoon.
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Providing levity and comfort to ideas of mortality, Kirsten Johnson has illuminated the sweet embrace of death.
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.
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.
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.
Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.
Funny and very sad at the same time, '**** Johnson Is Dead' proves to be a cathartic exercise for director Kirsten Johnson, who shares her fears to everyone that will experience the gradual loss of someone close. This is a unique documentary that deserves at least an Academy Award nomination.
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I must be missing something here, because I just don't get the hype behind director Kirsten Johnson's documentary about the last years of the life of her father, ****, an elderly Seattle psychiatrist besieged by the onset of dementia. Its eclectic mix of content doesn't gel well, despite some of the material being exceedingly well done. It comes across mostly as an often-endearing, loving tribute, though it's frequently weighed down by far too much extraneous, incidental and, at times, repetitive material. Then there are the picture's fictional segments in which the director presents comically gruesome stagings of her father's demise (a la the macabre suicide sequences from Hal Ashby's "Harold and Maude" (1971)) as a means of coping with **** impending passage (most of which aren't especially inventive or funny). Taken together, this amalgamation of material just doesn't mesh and leaves viewers with a confusing portrait of what the filmmaker was attempting to accomplish. Perhaps recutting the footage would have helped, but, as it stands now, this one doesn't come through as it should.
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[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]
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Production Company
Big Mouth Productions
Release Date Oct 2, 2020
Duration 1 h 29 m
Rating PG-13
Genres
Awards
Critics' Choice Documentary Awards
• 3 Wins & 5 Nominations
Cinema Eye Honors Awards, US
• 2 Wins & 4 Nominations
Indiana Film Journalists Association, US
• 1 Win & 3 Nominations
