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88You can see how this movie could have been jacked up into a one-level action picture, but what makes it special is how Thornton modulates the material.
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88Thornton and his excellent company summon up for us the long rides, dangerous companions, rites of passage, the mad love and, most of all, the special relationship between the man/boys that rode over the border and the horses that carried them there.
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80A perfectly coherent, handsomely rendered couple of hours, animated in particular by Damon's good performance -- shrewd, innocent, angry, wistful and, above all, likable.
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75Thornton, directing his first film since the minimalist "Sling Blade" (1996), has a much better grip on the material when he's focused on the scruffy desert landscape and the adventures of the two Texans.
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75An elegiac, visually hypnotic film about love, honor, reverence for nature and the loss of tradition.
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70In an odd way Pretty Horses has been too faithful to the spirit of this somber, fatalistic, melancholy romance, too much a stubborn ode to stoicism, to light any emotional fires.
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70The movie, for all its prettiness, manages to be shallow and portentous at the same time.
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70Thornton, writer-director of the superb "Slingblade," has a gift for depicting down-and-dirty scenes among men. And when our three principal characters go riding from Texas to Mexico, this is the best part of the movie.
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70The landscapes--which come close to outshining the worthy actors in the opening and closing stretches--are beautiful, and the plot, which is basically a grim coming-of-age story, holds one's interest throughout.
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67The film's elegiac tone and honest heart come through.
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63Lacks an essential sense of purpose.
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63To paraphrase Andre Malraux, it invokes but it doesn't always supply, doesn't course strongly enough with the book's themes of blood and earth and dislocation.
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63Even a full week after seeing it, I'm still influenced enough by the film's many enchantments not to be overly concerned with its flaws.
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60The movie's greatest liability is the familiarity of the material, much parodied since the glory days of John Ford. Unfortunately, Thornton's love for its iconography doesn't quite bring it to life.
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60All the Pretty Horses may end up being a good movie to watch on DVD, when all the footage is restored and we can see the subtle shadings Thornton jettisoned.
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60A movie of arresting pieces that don't harmonize into a satisfying whole.
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50It's like a tantalizing CliffsNotes version of what could have been.
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50Never really gets out of the starting gate.
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50As this year's literary adaptations go, Horses comes a lot closer to being a truly bad movie than "The Perfect Storm" did, yet it would be hard to argue that the two are not the year's most disappointing in terms of trampled hopes.
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50Remains as flat as the Texas plains.
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50A botched effort. Not necessarily bad, but hardly compelling either.
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50It doesn't help that Damon and Cruz fail to generate sparks or that the second half of the film, in which John and Lacey face hell in a Mexican prison, feels bluntly edited to fit a two-hour running time.
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50The film is too eager to please and falls short of the novel's tragic dimension.
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50A half-broken adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's great modern Western novel. Neither dull nor exciting.
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It all feels disorienting and truncated, as if the script, by Ted Tally, who also adapted "Silence of the Lambs," was a harried summary of the book.
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40It limps, not gallops, across the screen for what seems an interminable stretch of time and leaves the viewer with precious little to show for the experience.
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33McCarthy's rawhide has become movie Naugahyde, a substance unknown in literature or in nature.
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20At under two hours, the movie crawls by; at four, people would become fossilized to their seats.
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20Most movies take a while to slip you into a stupor. All the Pretty Horses makes you groggy right away. Set in 1949, it's a lackadaisical series of vignettes apparently culled from a much longer movie that never made it to the screen. Be thankful for that.