True to Dumont's understated style, the three acclaimed and commercially successful films criticized the prevailing climate of fear (during a regime in which doing so was often perilous) with metaphor and veiled references to current events.

Working prolifically following the advent of democracy, Dumont played, among others, an opinionated hobo in Lautaro Murúa's Cuarteles de invierno ("Winter Barracks," 1984) and a no-nonsense producer faced with an unpredictable film maker in La película del rey ("A King and His Movie," 1985), a title which has enjoyed international exposure since its VHS release the following year.

During an era in which Argentine cinema often revisited the traumas lived during the 1976–83 dictatorship, Dumont was cast in a leading role as an aging, targeted intellectual in Fernando Solanas' Sur ("South," 1987), one of the defining films on the subject.

Turning to more sentimental work in his later years, Dumont traveled to Cuba to play an aging businessman in the throes of hopelessness in Diego Musiak's Historias clandestinas en la Habana ("Hidden Stories in Havana," 1996).

A heavy smoker, Dumont suffered from worsening cardiovascular health subsequently and, yet, his work in film remained as vigorous as ever, playing a socially conscious priest in Cerca de la frontera ("Near the Border," 1999), an ex convict in a bind in Rosarigasinos ("Rosario Boys," 2001), a widower lost without his better half in La esperanza ("Hope," 2003), an elderly woman's inopportune lover in Conversaciones con mamá (2004), and a railroad worker laid off by the sector's mass 1992 privatizations in Próxima salida ("Next Stop," 2004), to name only a few of his recent film, theatre and television roles.