93
Metascore
18 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100Chicago ReaderDave KehrChicago ReaderDave KehrIt's American filmmaking at its finest—clean, clear, and direct—and it's also the most optimistic masterpiece on film, valiantly shoring fragments against human ruin.
- 100Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertTo watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water.
- 100LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenLarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDirected by Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo has its fair share of gunfights and saloon showdowns (including a bravura opening confrontation that unfolds with barely any words). Yet the film resembles other Westerns less than it does Hawks’ snappy romances, such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and To Have and Have Not.
- 100TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineRio Bravo is an excellent film featuring strong, proud, but very human characters who fight against their various handicaps and pull together to do a job and do it right.
- 100The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsThe A.V. ClubKeith PhippsRio Bravo features characters who form a familial bond while performing an impossible task in the face of death. It is, in other words, a Howard Hawks movie. It's a great one, too, and if it's not Hawks' best, it's certainly the most Hawksian.
- 100Chicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonChicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonBravo shines with humor and character. [28 Jul 2006, p.C10]
- 90The New YorkerRichard BrodyThe New YorkerRichard BrodyThe movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission.
- 90Time OutTime OutBeautifully acted, wonderfully observed, and scripted with enormous wit and generosity, it's the sort of film, in David Thomson's words, which reveals that 'men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world'.
- Despite its slickness, virility, occasional humor and, if it may be repeated, authentic professional approach, it is well-made but awfully familiar fare.