Cox himself plays a mysterious old man who shows up in an 1890 border town. It's another punk-absurdist Sunday-school lesson from the maker of "Sid and Nancy" and "Repo Man" — a director who should have been great.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
@OwenGleiberman See All
IFFR “Dead Souls” is the new movie directed by Alex Cox, which means that for the umpteenth time over the last four decades, the director of “Sid and Nancy” and “Repo Man” has made a movie that almost no one will see or care about. Cox crowdfunded the film with a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s yet another of his arid didactic put-on Westerns. This one stars Cox himself as a mysterious and formidable old man in an undertaker’s suit and parson’s hat who wanders into an Arizona border town in 1890 to gather the names of dead Mexican laborers. “Dead Souls,” which is loosely based on the 1843 Nikolai Gogol novel of the same title, has kicked around at film festivals, and it premiered tonight at the Roxy Cinema, an off-the-beaten-track theater in New York. Is it a good movie? No, not really. But it’s one that inspires me to imagine — as every Alex Cox movie does — the glory of what might have been.
Related Stories
