All The Pretty Horses: Critic Reviews

A boy's adventure story that has mistaken itself for an epic, and it rattles around in its own ambitions like a child's head in a 10-gallon hat.

This rendering is chillier than yesterday's coffee.

McCarthy's novel employs the coming of age narrative in service of his sanguineous spiritual vision, and for the film to renounce that philosophy is to give up its soul and be rendered lifeless.

A string of gorgeous pictures whose visual impact doesn't nearly resonate with the potency of the book's.

McCarthy deserves a better movie than this.

Whether you're familiar with the story or not, you'll have trouble feeling connected to it.

Lacks an essential sense of purpose.

Working from Ted Tally's casually artful script, director Billy Bob Thornton guides Matt Damon, Henry Thomas and Penelope Cruz to their most impressive performances in a major movie yet.

Lovely but disengaging, mysterious but uninvolving, physical but strangely remote.

The weight of myth sits on nearly every frame of the movie like a 400-pound gorilla.

In 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.

What is on screen is impressive, even with the sense of something missing.

Not a disaster as rumored to be, just a disappointing adaptation of a great novel. Thonrton fails to dramatize in visually or dramatically satisfying ways the hero's odyssey from innocence to experience, from childish game to acting with honor.

I'm a fan of all involved, but this is a really tough watch.

The movie that resulted from the studio's demand for cuts ... is a big-screen Cliff's Notes for the novel.

Despite a script which remains faithful to the sparse language of the novel, and some breathtaking cinematography, the whole production feels too lethargic.

Part elegy, part romance, and part myth, it's a sweeping paean to the lost West, a dreamy chronicling of the end of an age.

The result of what would appear to be a great deal of effort and some horribly misguided conviction is an extremely slow-moving train wreck.

...it's just so dull...

A soft, dusty, widescreen [old-school western]... an intelligent, sensitive drama with an epic scope, muted narrative and impressionistic heart.

Those horses are as attractive as promised, but the film's snail-like plot caused me to lose interest early on.

A film of infinite possibility that somehow got reduced to tangible mediocrity.

Unfolds carefully over an expansive canvas, with the same feel of involvement as a well-written epic novel.

a beautifully filmed modern Western that moves at a quick pace, but feels clunky and ill-formed

Comfortable in the saddle, but sadly confused the rest of the time.