Dead for a Dollar (2022) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by alex die waldelfe 4

  if you got the dollars for waltz and dafoe, you should have the dollars for decent color grading

• Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  Dead for a Dollar is dedicated to Budd Boetticher, but it feels closer in spirit to Randolph Scott Andre de Toth movies which were usually busier and make him more of a lawman in tight position. It has a very 50s B movie lean quality to it, there have not been a western by a known filmmaker with so little artier pretensions in over five decades (including Hill’s own early stabs at the genre). Dead for a Dollar is very happy to be the story of a moral man forced to deal with how doing the right thing for others is more than the letter of the law, a very classic western theme. It is remarkable good at playing into…

• Review by edoardomaione ★★ 2

  The colorist will be another dead man for a dollar

• Review by Josh Lewis ★★★

  Can't really begrudge anyone who finds the late style here to be low-rent dress-up but I kinda love how committed Hill is to the old-fashioned simplicity that feels like it would've even been a bit uncool in like the 60s.

• Review by pirateneckbeard ★★ 4

  I really wanted to enjoy this movie with a fun cast and the Venerable Walter Hill at the helm but man there was a lot of things here that just fell flat for me with how this western played out. Don't get me wrong the set design is solid and there are a lot of story arcs in play but the sepia-toned slow windup pitch took a long time for this pitch to be delivered that I just couldn't swing at this sinking slider. The ending added some intrigue but unfortunately for me it couldn't save it for me.

• Review by comrade_yui ★★★★ 1

  every outlaw and lawman here glances into a dusty window, behind beige drapes, through a glass darkly. the tired sepia makes the old west seem so impossibly far away: a time of men with codes, women who've been wronged, violence that was done. walter hill is one of our last living connections to the tradition that birthed cinema: the tradition of mann, hawks, de toth, peckinpah, ford, boetticher. this isn't a revision of the western, a subversion, a parody, an homage. it's an honest-to-god b-movie, a dying breed if there ever was one. we need to value these while we still have them; dead for a dollar might seem slow, clunky, dated, dry, but it's authentic, the work of a…

• Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  at one point in this, Christoph Waltz's character states that he's been hired to do a job and intends to get paid, it would have been easy for Walter Hill, now in his 80s with nothing to prove, to have done the same and just phoned in this decidedly grim western but he didn't -- this is a Hill film through and through, full of sinners and saints (but mostly sinners) flirting and hurting their way through the old west and racking up an impressive body count in the process; but like Hill's best films, it's also unapologetically weird, full of odd character quirks that would feel entirely out of place in a western by another filmmaker (like Willem Dafoe talking to a cockroach while not wearing any pants) but here they shine and, if the legitimately great climactic shoot out wasn't any indication, it's proof that we're back in Hill's hands one more (and maybe final) time

• Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝 ★★★½ 2

  I've become quite good at letting directors go.

  Directors that are my favourites and that were a big part of my formative filmwatching years but who have fallen on creatively hard times in their later years. I can take it. Brian De Palma built up more than enough good faith for me to forgive everything he's made since Femme Fatale. John Carpenter could never be defined by The Ward.

  I let Walter Hill go too, even if I quite liked Bullet in the Head. But then he made The Assignment, which wasn't just bad but also terribly misjudged and thematically disappointing, to say the very least. The advantage of thinking this way towards filmmakers (perhaps even actors as well) is…

• Review by joshrowley ★

  Cheap-looking; dull; dumbfounding; lifeless; slow; talky; ugly; unengaging.

• Review by shookone ★★★

  more old school than your grandpa's analogue christmas song collection

• Review by Edoardo Renna ★

  those Powerpoint ass transitions had me CACKLING😭

• Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★ 2

  Truly a gem for the Late Style freaks.

  The only character names I’m going to remember from the year in film 2022 are Jakesully and Tiberio Vargas.

  In better times Christoph Waltz would have starred in a whole series of low budget Westerns as an oddly fancy gunslinger in a funny hat.