Recensioni de* critic*

For Jarmusch, these lumpen zombies lack panache, their brainlessness is not romantic, and they deserve what they get.

Jarmusch’s film is an exuberantly imaginative comedy that’s also as fervently, vehemently, bitterly political as Wiseman’s documentary.

Jarmusch isn’t the first filmmaker to use the undead as fodder for political satire, but few have rendered the zombie apocalypse in such starkly melancholic terms.

"The Dead Don't Die" is far from Jarmusch's best, but there's something to be said for its zonked-out acceptance of extinction.

While chuckles abound all throughout the journey, the comedic liftoff seems to draw almost exclusively from the film’s bottomless cauldron of meta-textual and cinephile's references, with the result that Driver and Murray’s zombie purge gradually turns into a self-indulgent ride mired in cinematic detritus and jokes heard and seen countless times before.

The pessimism of "Deerskin" is echoed in "The Dead Don't Die," which is already being underrated in some quarters simply because it's not as funny as Jarmusch's other films. This movie is to his body of work what "Art School Confidential" was to Terry Zwigoff's—a case of an artist asking whether it's even worth bothering to make jokes in circumstances that call for terminal dismay.

That cast tells you something. The Dead Don’t Die doesn’t reinvigorate the zombie genre, as Jarmusch’s gorgeous, elegiac 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive did for vampire mythology. But it’s still an intimate picture, even for Jarmusch, who would never be caught making a noisy, in-your-face one.

While much of the pleasure may be located in its director’s trademark obsessions with hipsterism, his penchant for drawing out room tones and dead air, and his knack for repeating mediocre jokes until they achieve some semblance of hilarity, it also manufactures an ambivalent impression of progress and progressivism that reflects the uneasiness of expressing one’s taste in our present moment.

This peculiar, diverting comedy is potentially Jarmusch’s most commercial prospect in years, but it is perhaps his least satisfying – and could have benefitted from festering in the director’s mind a little longer before being exhumed for the screen.

I think it’s one of his best—lively, funny, smart, beautiful, and very, very sad, because almost all of the characters are really nice people and almost all of them will be killed by similarly nice people who awoke (now there’s a contradictory term that I forgot to ask Jarmusch about) from their graves because they tacitly allowed something very bad to happen to the entire planet.