Dead Man (Blu-ray)

THE CRITERION COLLECTION

With Dead Man, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law) imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death.

Accountant William Blake (Edward Scissorhands’s Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel. Wounded and on the lam, Blake falls under the watch of the outcast Nobody (Powwow Highway’s Gary Farmer), a Native American without a tribe, who guides his companion on a spiritual journey, teaching him to dispense poetic justice along the way.

Featuring austerely beautiful black-andwhite photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.