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Brokeback Mountain

Universal acclaim
Based on 41 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 1017 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Romance
Written by:
Larry McMurtry
Diana Ossana
E. Annie Proulx (short story)
Directed by: Ang Lee
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 9, 2005
DVD: April 4, 2006
Running Time: 134 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for sexuality, nudity, language and some violence
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Linda Cardellini, Anna Faris, and Scott Michael Campbell
Set against the sweeping vistas of Wyoming and Texas, the film tells the story of two young men -- a ranch-hand and a rodeo cowboy -- who meet in the summer of 1963, and unexpectedly forge a lifelong connection, one whose complications, joys, and tragedies provide a testament to the endurance and power of love. (Focus Features)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Lust, Caution Ride With the Devil Sense and Sensibility The Hulk The Ice Storm
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Ang Lee's unmissable and unforgettable Brokeback Mountain hits you like a shot in the heart. It's a landmark film and a triumph for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett
Anne Proulx's 1997 short story in the New Yorker has been masterfully expanded by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana to provide director Lee with his best movie since "Sense and Sensibility" in 1995.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
Lee and company handle the particulars of the tale with the requisite meticulousness and exquisite taste that marks all the director's films.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy because these men have found something that many people, of whatever sexual persuasion, never find - true love. And they can't do anything about it.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Confidently directed by Ang Lee and featuring sensitive and powerful performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and a breathtaking Heath Ledger, this film is determined to involve us in the naturalness and even inevitability of its epic, complicated love story.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Brokeback Mountain aspires to an epic sweep and achieves it, though with singular intimacy and grace.
USA Today Mike Clark
It's a heart-wrenching portrayal of unfulfilled Wyoming love, but this time, we don't mean Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in "Shane."
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Gently unfolds into an epic, heartbreaking love story that's far greater than the sum of its parts.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
There's neither coyness nor self-importance in Brokeback Mountain--just close, compassionate observation, deeply committed performances, a bone-deep feeling for hardscrabble Western lives. Few films have captured so acutely the desolation of frustrated, repressed passion.
Read Full Review >Empire Staff (Not credited)
The real revelation here is Heath Ledger as the bruised and sometimes brutal Ennis. His tortured secret is the tragedy and the ecstasy of this powerful and moving film, a smart study of relationships that could but can't and never will be.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Brokeback Mountain has been described as "a gay cowboy movie," which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
This poignant, wise and subtle picture -- which, yes, happens to be the best movie of the year -- should be approached with humble expectations. Lee's approach to this delicate material is suffused with melancholy, metaphors and small, telling touches that favor subtlety over exclamation points and rough-hewn simplicity over grandiloquence.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
An experience as tender and troubling as any you're likely to get - or not likely, if this subject puts you off.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
So in all the tumult about this film, the eruption of its subject into wide attention and the consequent revelations about cowboys' lives in the past, let us--without forgetting the American sources of the screenplay--acknowledge the anomaly that the director is Chinese.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Beautiful, poetic, mournful, at once rich and spare, Brokeback Mountain takes a daring conceit and creates of it an overwhelming work of art that should speak to anyone capable of love.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
It's by far the most uncompromising and unapologetic gay-themed drama ever made for a wide release by a major Hollywood studio with name stars.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Brokeback Mountain is at once the gayest and the least gay Hollywood film I've seen, which is another way of saying that Lee has a knack for culling universality from the most specific identities.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Bill Gallo
If, in its groundbreaking assault on the mythology of the American West, Brokeback Mountain gets a lot of people into a furious lather, so be it.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
The remarkable thing director Ang Lee has done is to have made a film that remains firmly in the Western genre while never retreating from its portrayal of a tragic love story.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
It's possible to point to some weak spots in Brokeback – its seeming multiple endings, the lack of clarity about certain images, some digressions – but there is no movie this year that has moved my heart more than Brokeback Mountain.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
A good and eloquent Wyoming-set love story with a great performance at its heart.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
While Gyllenhaal is a competent actor, Ledger - surprisingly enough - is becoming a great one, and the levels of intensity they bring to their roles render this romantically star-crossed relationship emotionally lopsided.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
While Gyllenhaal has playful puppy eyes and energy, his performance as Jack is a blur of mustaches, sideburns and spurs that never achieves the weight of Ledger's.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
It allows Lee to draw out a theme that's been present in his films from the start: the notion that repressed passion does no one any good. In Brokeback Mountain, it turns vibrant men ghostly.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
This ostensible gay Western is marked by a heightened degree of sensitivity and tact, as well as an outstanding performance from Heath Ledger.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
This is one of the best serious films about homosexuality ever made, but though it's sad and sobering it's still only a rough draft of a great movie.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Isn't for everyone, but for those who are not bothered by the homosexual relationship, it offers a study in yearning, love, and loss. It didn't affect me as deeply as either "The Bridges of Madison County" or "The Remains of the Day," but it evokes some of the same feelings.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Ledger proves what we've suspected all along -- this is his picture, and he steals it brilliantly.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is the kind of tasteful tearjerker that's often overrated and smothered with prizes because it flatters our tolerance and sensitivity.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Brokeback Mountain possesses handsome and sympathetic lead players, magnificent scenery, heartbreaking melodrama, righteousness and cultural import. But as a testament to the importance of following one's passion, it's devoid of one crucial thing: passion.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
The most straightforward love story--and in some ways the straightest--to come out of Hollywood, at least since "Titanic."
Read Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
For all its brave beginnings and real achievements--its assault on western mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected locale--Brokeback Mountain finally fails to fully engage our emotions.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Brokeback Mountain could use a little more of it--by which I mean more sweat and other bodily fluids. Ang Lee's formalism is so extreme that it's often laughable, and the sex is depicted as a holy union: Gay love has never been so sacred.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Romanticism fights stoicism to a draw, and the movie grows ever more static, too. Down to the quasi-ambiguous hate-crime finish, Brokeback Mountain comes as close to being a still life as you can get with human characters.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Phil Hall
This much-ballyhooed gay cowboy melodrama is an inert disappointment.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.2 (out of 10) based on 1017 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
malaysian fan ann gave it a1:
The feeling is so strong if ...you knew that no body knew you stuck in love with that man..normal people don't understand that feeling..so of course they feel disguisting and ..decent it. you people don't know...that miracle feeling....man love man even just for sex...but it's very strong...and make u cry and cry....my god.
roman m gave it a10:
This movie has dug so far into my soul and touched me so deep that its haunting effect may never go away. never has a movie made me take a long look in the mirror at myself, the life i've led, wanted to lead, what i've had to let go and why., what and who fills my heart with unimaginable joy and how sometimes that joy has been turned into unimaginable sorrow. this film has taken me to places that terrify me and leave me speechless while at the same time makes me realize what a precious gift i have been given....the ability to give and receive love in all its graces and hearrtbreaks. i will never take that gift f or it sunkown outcome for granted.but pursue it and be thankful i was allowed the journey.
carpe diem gave it a2:
As a gay man with gay friends... none of us felt this was a realistic depiction of the way it happens. This movie is a tragedy (in the Romeo and Juliet sense) that could have had power, but failed because of it's completely non-believable depiction of how the relationship formed. If anyone thinks Ang Lee may be homosexual... I would have to say he can't be. Not if he directs a movie with such an unrealistic development of a gay relationship.
Steffi C gave it a10:
I Loved Heath Ledger in this film, i cried three times with his performance. Heath and Jake were the right actors to cast in this film. Excellent film!
Jesus black gave it a10:
Brokeback mountain is the 4th best film i've ever seen. it's amazing that ang lee, who created the hulk,(the worst movie i've ever seen), could create such an untimely and beautiful masterpiece. it makes me proud to be gay!!!
Jonathan F gave it a10:
One of the most remarkable films I have ever seen. It is perfect. Heath Ledger is brilliant, and the fact that he is gone only makes this film that much more heart-wrenching. This movie belongs to Ledger, but you cannot deny the accomplishments of the rest of the cast - Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway are fantastic, as is Kate Mara as Ledger's daughter. The final scene is one of excruciating emotion. What a truly incredible film. Also, one of the most important ever made.
Al S. gave it a10:
Perfect in every literary aspect, superbly complemented by the musical score.
