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Title: Surreal and just short of satisfying.
Review: Dead Man is dreamlike. Filmed in a rich, textured monochrome, the movie follows a young accountant who leaves Cleveland, Ohio for a job in a remote frontier town in the Pacific Northwest. The defining cinematic technique involves presenting the story in short snippets -- chapters varying in length that fade quickly to black. But while Dead Man captures the feeling of a dream, and is chock full of symbols of various kinds, it doesn't really work as much more than an hallucinatory trip of sorts, and its attempt to tell a greater story -- the path from life to death to afterlife -- ends up being more odd and pretentious than artistic. It has the feel of someone trying too hard to be profound and quirky. It left me empty and only slightly engaged.
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