Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
66
Bandslam
45
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
29
Collector, The
23
Couples Retreat
80
District 9
61
Extract
39
Fame
xx
Fantastic Mr. Fox
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
60
Funny People
32
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
27
Gamer
41
G-Force
39
Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
55
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
33
Love Happens
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
51
My Sister's Keeper
42
Orphan
28
Pandorum
63
Perfect Getaway, A
86
Ponyo![]()
35
Post Grad
48
Proposal, The
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
24
Sorority Row
83
Star Trek![]()
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
55
Taking Woodstock
47
Time Traveler's Wife
96
Toy Story/Toy Story 2 3D![]()
35
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
28
Ugly Truth, The
88
Up![]()
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum![]()
56
Adam
72
Adela
39
Adventures of Power
78
Afghan Star
61
After the Storm
66
Afterschool
xx
All the Best
58
American Casino
72
Amreeka
48
Antichrist
73
Araya
62
Art & Copy
55
As Seen Through These Eyes
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The![]()
13
Beautiful Life, A
70
Beeswax
35
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
71
Big Fan
66
Black Dynamite
51
Blind Date
xx
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
76
Bliss
35
Blue Tooth Virgin, The
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
57
Boys Are Back, The
45
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star![]()
70
Bronson
45
Burning Plain, The
xx
Carriers
55
Casi Divas
57
Chelsea on the Rocks
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
59
Collapse
44
Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
82
Cove, The![]()
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The![]()
67
Departures
xx
Dil Bole Hadippa
71
Disgrace
xx
Do Knot Disturb
70
Earth Days
24
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat
85
Education, An![]()
55
Endgame
xx
Eulogy for a Vampire
xx
Everyone Else
xx
Fatal Promises
56
Fifty Dead Men Walking
62
Five Minutes of Heaven
74
Flame & Citron
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
28
Free Style
xx
From Mexico with Love
50
Fuel
25
Gentlemen Broncos
50
Give Me Your Hand
58
Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo![]()
52
Grace
66
Harmony and Me
81
Headless Woman, The![]()
xx
Heretics, The
63
Horse Boy, The
73
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
74
Humpday
94
Hurt Locker, The![]()
29
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
16
If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
75
In Search of Beethoven
83
In the Loop![]()
61
Intimate Enemies
42
Irene in Time
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
19
Labor Day
xx
Laila's Birthday
41
Little Ashes
41
Little Traitor, The
66
Liverpool
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
83
Maid, The![]()
xx
Ministers, The
59
More Than a Game
67
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
xx
Mystery Team
48
New York, I Love You
73
Night and Day
66
No Impact Man
47
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
34
Other Man, The
xx
Painter Sam Francis, The
54
Paper Heart
xx
Paradise
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
44
Peter and Vandy
35
Play the Game
77
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
xx
Pretty Ugly People
65
Providence Effect, The
76
Rembrandt's J'accuse
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
40
Shrink
61
Skin
77
Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, A
xx
Skiptracers
46
Splinterheads
39
St. Trinian's
89
Still Walking![]()
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
55
Storm
65
Tetro
70
That Evening Sun
72
Thirst
xx
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (re-release)
61
Trucker
xx
Turning Green
83
U2 3D![]()
66
Unmade Beds
66
Unmistaken Child
70
Visual Acoustics
55
Walt & El Grupo
67
Way We Get By, The
69
We Live in Public
64
Wedding Song, The
64
Where is Where?
xx
White on Rice
74
Woman in Berlin, A
69
World's Greatest Dad
70
Yes Men Fix the World
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
xx
You, the Living
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 35 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 56 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Western
Written by: Guillermo Arriaga
Directed by: Tommy Lee Jones
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 16, 2005
DVD: June 6, 2006
Running Time: 121 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / France
Summary
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)
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...
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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
What a strange and strangely compelling movie this is.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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?
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It lacks even Tarantino-esque vitality. It moves more like a busted concertina.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The film is dreadfully slow without much in the way of rewards.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
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.
