Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The nervy style of this newfangled Western, with its eerie, insinuating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is so effective that long after Pitt and Affleck have left the screen, emotional disturbance lingers like gun smoke.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Though there is plenty of gunplay, this is a wondrously contemplative and poetic saga that offers a fresh and bewitching take on a timeworn genre.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

A peculiar and destabilizing tone that's far from the standard Hollywood oater, but entirely fitting for two larger-than-life characters fulfilling their roles in history.

Empire Ian Nathan

An extraordinary and visionary study of a legendary murderer’s famous fate, within touching distance of Oscars.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Pitt won the Best Actor award at Venice for his Jesse...Yet it's Affleck who impresses most as the wary, skittish Bob.

Variety Todd McCarthy

One of the best Westerns of the 1970s, which represents the highest possible praise. It's a magnificent throwback to a time when filmmakers found all sorts of ways to refashion Hollywood's oldest and most durable genre.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Artfully exciting and compulsively watchable even at a butt-numbing 152 minutes, the film makes good on the promise New Zealand writer-director Andrew Dominik showed with "Chopper" in 2000.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Proceeds at a very stately pace, hoping the otherworldly mood of its detailed recreation of the old West might seep into the viewer's bones. This viewer did, as it happens, fall under the film's spell.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Here is another Western in the classical tradition.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It is a film, often breathtaking without settling for being pretty, filled with nervous silence.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Mournful and moody, crepuscular and poetic, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford turns one of cinema's most rehearsed tales into a dreamy inquiry into the nature of sadism, hero-worship and betrayal.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

I wish this movie wasn't so purposefully elegiac and attenuated – at times it's like a middling Terrence Malick fantasia – but it's well worth sitting through.

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

No one in the movie is entirely right in the head, least of all James, whose rapidly disintegrating sanity provides Pitt with his juiciest role since "Snatch," one he chomps into with all the relish of a guy who’s been playing suave leading men for too long.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Does something no other Jesse James movie has done: It tells the truth.

Film Threat Matthew Sorrento

In a case where the most dangerous are kept dangerously close, here we have a rarity: a suspenseful, yet dramatic Western.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The language of its narrative, like that of its characters, may be elevated -- a literary Western version of Damon Runyon -- but the words are intriguing, challenging and, occasionally, very funny.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

I can tell you in nine words whether you'll want to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Writer-director Andrew Dominik wants to be Terrence Malick.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The movie dreamily conjures up the outlaw's last months, and it's gorgeous, but long, cumbersome, and slightly shallow.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

It’s far less engaging than the recent "3:10 to Yuma" remake and concentrates more on the details than the broad picture.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

A long, ambitious, fitfully rewarding movie, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is less about the gun-toting outlaws of the 1880s than the filmmaking outlaws of the 1970s.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Although not as radically defamiliarizing as Jim Jarmusch's avant-western "Dead Man," Jesse James has the feel of an attic ransacked for abandoned knickknacks.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Represents a breakthrough in the moviegoing experience. It may be the first time we've been asked to watch a book on tape.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub

Ponderous, repetitive and lacking a single rousing action sequence.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

This revisionist western by writer-director Andrew Dominik makes a wan attempt to present the Jesse James legend as the dawn of celebrity culture in America.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Mr. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

This fascinating relationship gets smothered in pointlessly long takes, repetitive scenes, grim Western landscapes and mumbled, heavily accented dialogue.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A film whose reach exceeds its grasp. Hugely ambitious and not without moments of success, this indulgent 2 hour and 40 minute epic ends up as unwieldy as its elongated title. It's a movie in love with itself, and few things are more fatal than that.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Maybe the life was edited out of it in the two years between shooting and release, or maybe Dominik was simply overwhelmed by the outsized myths of the West, but the film only comes to life after James' death, when Ford quite literally takes center stage.

Slate Dana Stevens

The mere phrase "Brad Pitt as Jesse James" makes for a kind of mini-reflection on the evolution of celebrity culture. It's a shame that The Assassination of Jesse James never goes much deeper than that tag line.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A gorgeous snooze, somewhere between imitation Terrence Malick and a feature version of star Brad Pitt's notorious Vanity Fair layout with Angelina Jolie and their faux kids.