Brokeback Mountain: Critic Reviews

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.

Annie Proulx's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love has been faithfully translated onto the screen in Ang Lees landmark film.

The whole movie is a rich, spacious, passionate way of showing, not telling, feelings that dare not speak their name -- and doing so with superb intelligence and magnificent candour.

It's an old-style virtue for a film that's old-style in the best way: unassuming but people-oriented and aiming to endure.

A sweeping, solemn, self-serious chronicle of their relationship over several decades.

The reason to see Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, and see it you should, isn't its hot-button topicality or its cultural cachet but simply that it's a very good movie, with a staggeringly fine performance by Heath Ledger.

All is tasteful, and far more convincing than the movie's representation of passion is its only-the-lonely evocation of a punishing social order.

An epic, heartbreaking love story that's far greater than the sum of its parts.

A film about love and the cost of lying that's exquisite in its beauty, painful in its truths.

A story of forbidden love on the range, Brokeback Mountain is acted, directed, written and photographed with heart-pounding beauty.

Like these indelible cowboys, you, too, may find it impossible not to succumb to the powerful, quiet greatness that is Brokeback Mountain.

Ang Lee conveys maddening delirium rendered in the way one man's eyes gaze at another's, and then look away, and the looking-away amounts to the murder of two souls as surely as if they'd drawn guns and hit each other in the heart.

Its beauty wells from its sorrow, because the love between Ennis and Jack is most credible not in the making but in the thwarting.

The filmmakers have focused so intently and with such feeling on Jack and Ennis that the movie is as observant as work by Bergman.

A good and eloquent Wyoming-set love story with a great performance at its heart.

Much as it is about love, Brokeback is also a potent study of repression that comes alive in Ledger's shattering performance.

It has become shorthand to call Brokeback Mountain the 'gay cowboy movie,' but it is much more than that glib description implies. This is a human story, a haunting film in the tradition of the great Hollywood romantic melodramas.

If love does indeed conquer all, it should win hearts across America. If not, then its focus on a tragic stigma will remain as valid as its story suggests.

There's no contest. Brokeback Mountain is the most poignant movie love story of the year.

I was never moved or even overly excited by what I finally witnessed on the screen, though I have no quarrel with the superlatives heaped upon the film by most of my colleagues.

Brokeback Mountain is an American masterpiece.

This ostensible gay Western is marked by a heightened degree of sensitivity and tact, as well as an outstanding performance from Heath Ledger.

This is one of the best serious films about homosexuality ever made, but though it's sad and sobering it's still only a rough draft of a great movie.

Both [Gyllenhaal and Ledger] embody what that old Waylon and Willie song taught us -- 'Cowboys ain't easy to love, and they're harder to hold.'