SummaryA 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 pain, an... Read More
Directed By:Kirsten Johnson
Written By:Nels Bangerter, Kirsten Johnson
Dick Johnson Is Dead
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
89
User score
Generally Favorable
7.4
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Metascore
Universal Acclaim
100% Positive
28 Reviews
28 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Oct 8, 2020
100
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.
Jan 26, 2020
100
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
77% Positive
46 Ratings
46 Ratings
15% Mixed
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
8% Negative
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
Dec 10, 2025
10
**** Johnson Is Dead là phim tài liệu vừa hài hước vừa cảm động, biến nỗi sợ cái chết thành lời ca ngợi tình cha con và sự sáng tạo.
Jan 10, 2021
10
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.
Jan 28, 2020
91
Providing levity and comfort to ideas of mortality, Kirsten Johnson has illuminated the sweet embrace of death.
Sep 28, 2020
88
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.
Oct 2, 2020
80
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.
Sep 30, 2020
75
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.
Sep 28, 2020
75
Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.
Oct 18, 2020
9
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.
Dec 30, 2020
8
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.
Apr 13, 2021
6
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.
Production Company:
- Big Mouth Productions
Release Date:Oct 2, 2020
Duration:1 h 29 m
Rating:PG-13
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
