Review: The Dead Don’t Die, 2019, dir. Jim Jarmusch

Of late, I have made a new rule for myself: Don’t get excited about movies. I mean, movies excite me, sure, but I don’t go out of my way to hype myself over everything yet to open in theaters or stream on Netflix. I see lots of movies. Lots of movies are just sort of fine. When you walk into a movie expecting it to be better than “fine,” and it turns out only to be “fine,” well, that makes the experience a bummer and the job a bit of a challenge.

The Dead Don’t Die is one of the few exceptions* to this rule that I’ve made in 2019, and hey, what do you know, it single handedly validates the need for that rule. It is “fine.” I didn’t hate watching it. But it’s also nowhere near as good as I thought it’d be given that Jim Jarmusch is one of the slickest directors out there today. 

You can read my full thoughts over at Paste Magazine.

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*Other exceptions: The Nightingale, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Ready or Not, Knives Out, Little Women, Black Christmas. Rules are meant to be broken!