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Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The
Sony Pictures Classics

Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The reviews


7.8

based on 35 reviews
Read critic reviews
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based on 56 votes
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MPAA RATING: R for language, violence and sexuality

Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, Melissa Leo, Vanessa Bauche, and Levon Helm

A man is shot and quickly buried in the high desert of West Texas. The body is found and reburied in Van Horn's town cemetery. Peter Perkins (Jones), a local ranch foreman kidnaps a Border Patrolman and forces him to disinter the body. With his captive in tow and the body tied to a mule, Pete undertakes a dangerous and quixotic journey into Mexico. (Sony Pictures Classics)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Western
WRITTEN BY:	Guillermo Arriaga
DIRECTED BY:	Tommy Lee Jones
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: June 6, 2006 Theatrical: December 16, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	121 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA / France
LANGUAGE(S):	English / Spanish

Best Actor (Jones) and Best Screenplay, 2005 Cannes Film Festival

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...

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

100

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Wily, sad, funny, and full of life.

100

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 7.8 (out of 10) based on 56 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

giulia gave it an8:
I liked that movie. Yes there are some sterotypes. But it doesnt matter to me. It has a lot of charme. But hey I also loved Amorres Perros.

Michael H gave it a7:
I was prepared NOT to like this movie because of the P.C. premise: good, poor Mexicans/bad gringo (with one exception). As it turns out the movie gets a lot more sophisticated in parts. (spoiler alert) The character of Melquiades turns out to have a "darker" side as does the Pete character. Still I think the border guard character was a little too cartoonishly bad or at least put into the position of being the "bad guy" in a way that seemed too much told from an "undeclared" Mexican perspective. In the end the script "rights" itself a little, allowing for fuller character development.

Adam L. gave it a1:
Two hours that seem like four, consistently pedestrian writing, and a complete deficit of morality make this not only one of the worst films I have ever seen (and I've seen more than a few), but a dangerous one. The only thing saving it from a flat-out zero is the great acting by everyone involved. What a waste. Even Sam Peckenpah would be ashamed.

Christian W. gave it a5:
After reading gushing reviews for this film I was disappointed and, frankly, bored as this surprisingly shallow modern western meandered to a conclusion that had me asking "is that it?". Good points were Dwight Yoakam's acting, though his character exited too early, and the films dark and slightly surreal atmosphere. Bad aspects include its slow pace, irrelevant encounters, hard to swallow coincidences, Tommy Lee Jones' unconvincing character and lack of expression, loose ends and stereotyped characters. Some of the scenes with the corpse made me wonder ifI was watching the third "Weekend at Bernies" installment by mistake.

Agatino Z. gave it a10:
It is so sad when a Wonderful film passes by almost unnoticed. The way this movie is structured, in fragments, that come and go according to the characters feelings and ethics is keeps the storyline original. The quiet acting, the vistas, the rights and wrongs. And the notion that a man like Pete Perkins has long disapeared from the face of the earth, says so much about how a society has lost touch with humanity. In Pete Perkins' care of the decaying body of Melquiades we find more respect for human beings than in any real life characters. Along with Eastwood's Unforgiven and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, the West has moved into the sunset that the early films were anticipating. I congratulate Tommy Lee Jones, for he has created a modern quiet masterpiece.

Mark O. gave it a10:
An important film for Americans to see amidst today's heightened racial and class tensions...

Jim G. gave it a6:
Old school western that keeps you engaged.

Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Sony Pictures Classics

Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The
Sony Pictures Classics