Synopsis
With this inventive portrait, director Kirsten Johnson 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.
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Cast
- Richard JohnsonSelf
- Kirsten JohnsonSelf
- Isla SierckSelf
- Jed SierckSelf
- Felix TorresSelf
- Viva TorresSelf
- Raymond DamazoSelf
- Michael HilowSelf
- Michael MeltonSelf
- Joanne Reiner TuckerSelf
Recommendations
- 100
The Hollywood Reporter
Dick Johnson Is Dead is a funny, touching and, to be sure, unique film, and the Johnsons are a very fortunate father and daughter - 91
IndieWire
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. - 91
The Film Stage
Providing levity and comfort to ideas of mortality, Kirsten Johnson has illuminated the sweet embrace of death. - 91
Entertainment Weekly
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. - 90
Variety
At once a celebration and a lament, simultaneously jubilant and ineffably sad, it’s a film worth sticking around to see. - 90
Slashfilm
Dick Johnson is Dead is both a poetic act of defiance and a portrait of love at the end of a life. - 88
LarsenOnFilm
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. - 83
The Playlist
It’s when Johnson strays from strict adherence to the concept that the most profound insights come.
