Synopsis
Outlaw Jesse James is rumored to be the 'fastest gun in the West'. An eager recruit into James' notorious gang, Robert Ford eventually grows jealous of the famed outlaw and, when Robert and his brother sense an opportunity to kill James, their murderous action elevates their target to near mythical status.
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Cast
- Casey AffleckRobert Ford
- Brad PittJesse James
- Sam RockwellCharley Ford
- Paul SchneiderDick Liddil
- Jeremy RennerWood Hite
- Garret DillahuntEd Miller
- Sam ShepardFrank James
- Mary-Louise ParkerZee James
- Zooey DeschanelDorothy Evans
- Ted LevineSheriff Timberlake
Recommendations
- 100
Entertainment Weekly
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. - 100
The A.V. Club
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. - 90
Variety
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. - 88
Rolling Stone
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. - 83
Christian Science Monitor
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. - 78
Austin Chronicle
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. - 63
ReelViews
It’s far less engaging than the recent "3:10 to Yuma" remake and concentrates more on the details than the broad picture. - 60
Village Voice
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.
