Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Incisive yet supple, wrenching yet deeply pleasurable, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada easily ranks among the year's best pictures.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

Making an altogether impressive big-screen directing debut, Jones exudes quiet control over this full-bodied Western, taking pleasure in his measured pacing, mixing somber authority with flashes of surrealist wit and luxuriating in the magnificent, vanishing vistas of his home state.

Premiere Peter Debruge

Three Burials is beautiful, authentic and brutally observant of human nature. With real Tex-Mex backdrops instead of the usual Monument Valley vistas and characters too complex to withstand simple white-hat/black-hat reductionism, Three Burials is a visionary portrait of the New West. This is the terrain of Eastwood and Peckinpah, saddled with the concerns of 21st-century life.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Tommy Lee Jones steps behind the camera to direct himself in the most impressive directorial debut the American cinema has seen in some time, a contemporary western both rough and poetic, laconic and passionate.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

All this edginess, combined with the grandeur and sweep of a classic western, demonstrates that Jones clearly knows how to tell a story -- and how to confound us at the same time.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Wily, sad, funny, and full of life.

Empire Rob Frazer

Grizzled Texan Tommy Lee Jones has made an exceptionally moving, surprisingly funny, often beautiful film, packed with unforgettable moments and note-perfect performances.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Outstandingly realized on all levels.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Don't let the near-impossible-to-remember title keep you away from this singular and slightly surreal Tommy Lee Jones scorcher.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Jones' film actually takes you somewhere you haven't visited in a million other movies. It has a wonderful sense of place, and space, and carries the bite and tang of a good short story.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Sam Peckinpah lives! The rampaging spirit of the late filmmaker, known as Bloody Sam for films such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," is all over this blistering modern Western from first-time director Tommy Lee Jones.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Jones displays a firm hand at the helm -- you sense that he is well within his comfort zone in this environment -- and performances including his own are lively and convincing.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

In a film filled with plaintively expressive faces, characters say as much when they don't talk as when they speak Mr. Arriaga's dialogue, which sometimes sounds like hardscrabble poetry, sometimes sounds real as dirt and is, rather surprisingly, often darkly funny.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

If The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has some languid patches, it's also a work of uncommon maturity and remarkable poetry.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Jones handles his fellow actors well, drawing a hard, anguished performance from Pepper and allowing January Jones (no relation) to bring a touching vulnerability to Mike's bored, vapid, baby-doll wife.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

If Jones were a more accomplished director, and if the relationship between Pete and his captive wasn't so schematic, this movie might have been worthy of Sam Peckinpah.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A small movie that plays like a Western epic.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

There are strange variations in the mood of Three Burials that may strike some viewers as flippant. As gritty and real as the business of toting a corpse at gunpoint gets, the tone occasionally veers into farce. But it's never too long before the focus returns to Jones' weathered eyes.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

What a strange and strangely compelling movie this is.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Its social consciousness aside, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is really a simple love story between men set in the American West, although unlike "Brokeback Mountain," this love is purely platonic -- nothing more than the bond of brotherhood between two dear friends, a classic Western theme.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

Jones and Pepper are no Eastwood and Wallach, but the fact that one even thinks to make such a comparison speaks highly of the work here.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Jones directs with all the grit that's associated with his onscreen persona, but Peckinpah would never allow this degree of sentimentality to slip into one of his Westerns. A better comparison might be to Clint Eastwood, another tough-guy actor whose work as a director is often a little soft at the center.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

I admired the leisure and intensity of this morality tale.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Arriaga's script (a prize at Cannes) has a lovely, fascinating shape to it, even if his crushing portrayal of white Americans--all of them, even Jones, suffering from a zombified affect and crippling shortsightedness--is somewhat counterset against his Mexicans, who are all morally balanced, if not always happy or nice.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The film's plea for old-fashioned pride and racial tolerance is muffled by a plain, unanticipated fact: Pete Perkins is out of his mind.

Time Richard Schickel

The film comes uncomfortably close to risible. But it also achieves moments of real power. It's worth a wary look before it attains midnight cult-movie status.

Slate Stephen Metcalf

For a movie about the policing of borders, couldn't this one have policed a firmer one, between credibility and incredibility? Between seriousness and self-seriousness?

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It lacks even Tarantino-esque vitality. It moves more like a busted concertina.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The film is dreadfully slow without much in the way of rewards.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

An unabashed descendant of "Bring Me the Head." This time, though, it's an entire corpse that gets hauled through the desert, and that's not all that's being toted. So is a hefty parcel of racial correctness.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Oh no, another let's-drag-a-dead-body-to-Mexico flick?

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Writer Guillermo Arriaga earns most of the blame. He played similar games with narrative in the vastly better "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," jumping back and forth in time to show relationships among subplots and characters. But "Burials" barely has one plot.