Artist Dead Man (1995)

When Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man premièred at Cannes in 1995, an audience member famously yelled, “Piece of shit, Jim!” during the post-screening Q&A, and the film earned an initial reputation as a turgid misstep from a usually reliable art-house star. (Even the French didn’t like it.) The atmospheric Western barely got a U.S. release, but the few who saw it began to spread the word that Jarmusch had been shafted, and now many believe it’s the director’s best film, a dryly funny and knowing meditation on American mythology. Johnny Depp plays an accountant named William Blake who travels to the frontier town of Machine, where he befriends an Indian named Nobody and accidentally becomes an infamous fugitive outlaw. 

Updated 06/08/2011