- 10
...a haunting retelling of one of the enduring outlaw sagas in American culture...
—Lisa Schwarzbaum Entertainment Weekly
- 10
...a dark, iconoclastic Western that lacks clear heroes and villains, tucks its only shoot 'em up sequence in the opening reel, and closes on a note of profound ambiguity and regret. In look and tone, it recalls moody revisionist Westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Shooting, but with a special attentiveness to the natural world that's closer to Terrence Malick.
—Scott Tobias Onion AV Club
- 8
Gritty but mythic, a dirty western with clean shirts, oblique in some ways and obvious in others, Jesse James is a bold, even wacky, reinvention.
—J. Hoberman Village Voice
- 8
The film does not concern itself with finding ways to get a mainstream audience rooting for the characters, or against them. It is a film, often breathtaking without settling for being pretty, filled with nervous silence.
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 8
This is a movie that very much wants to be a classic. Infuriatingly, every once in a while it manages to become just that.
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor
- 8
...a masterwork that already has the feel of a classic. It's a complex, beautifully shot, elegiac tale set in the fading West that examines the price of fame and misguided hero worship.
—Pete Hammond Maxim
- 8
...a triumph...
—Nick Schager Slant Magazine
- 8
...floridly but concisely summed up by the film's title 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.
—Glenn Kenny Premiere
- 8
Gritty but mythic, a dirty western with clean shirts, oblique in some ways and obvious in others, Jesse James is a bold, even wacky, reinvention.
—J. Hoberman LA Weekly
- 8
...a quiet wow of a Western...
—Peter Travers Rolling Stone
- 8
...here is another Western in the classical tradition.
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times
- 7
...really stays with you.
—Leah Rozen People
- 6
Taken on its own narrow, heavily aestheticized and poetic-realist terms...The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford works.
—Manohla Dargis New York Times
- 5
...a self-conscious throwback to revisionist Westerns of the 1970s: disillusioned, contemplative and committed to debunking popular myths of the heroic American West.
—Maitland McDonagh TV Guide
- 5
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.
—Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times
- 5
Stodgy and deathly slow, Jesse James takes the longest route possible to an anticipated resolution.
—Sean O'Connell filmcritic.com
- 5
...a long, empty exercise in style.
—Pam Grady Reel
- 4
...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.
—Lou Lumenick New York Post
- 4
...a bleak meditation on absence: absence of conflict, absence of compelling characters and absence of any good reason to sit through three hours of it.
—N.V. Cooper E!