A meek accountant from Cleveland travels west by train to a town called Machine and a job that no longer exists. Things deteriorate from there.

DEAD MAN (1995) is Jim Jarmusch's psychedelic western - his own term for it - shot in black and white by Robby Müller, scored by Neil Young improvising alone in a recording studio while watching the film, and populated by one of the most extraordinary ensemble casts ever assembled for a film that earned just over a million dollars at the box office:

Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Robert Mitchum (in his final screen role), John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Henriksen, Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfred Molina, Jared Harris - most of them appearing briefly, some barely at all, each one landing like a visitation.

The character names scatter references throughout - marshals named after Lee Hazlewood and Marv Throneberry, a campfire stranger named after Tom Petty's keyboard player - as if Jarmusch were encoding a private mythology into the bones of a genre he was pulling apart and thoughtfully sewing back together.

Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars and wrote that he had no idea what Jarmusch was trying to do. A.O. Scott later called it one of the very best films of the 1990s. Dead Man is a film about dying that moves at the pace of a man's life slowly slipping away - unhurried, hallucinatory, and finally, unexpectedly beautiful.