Pjtaylor-96-138044 While 'Hell Or High Water (2016)' has a few overwrought and oddly expositional moments, it's an excellent heist thriller that uses its palpable sense of place and brilliantly well-realised characters to totally compound you within its incredibly realistic and wonderfully tactile world. It immerses you in the dusty planes of a 'Neo-Western' New Mexico with confidence and ease. There's a lot to unpack thematically, from the phenomenal mirror-image brother relationships to the thinly veiled political message, and most moments, even the exciting and genuinely tense 'action' sequences, are conveyed with a subtlety that makes for a much quieter, more character-driven affair than usual. It has proper stakes and emotionally affecting moments of all kinds, and it certainly leaves a lasting impression. 8/10

rcastl2335 When a film that is loudly and ostentatiously set in Cowboy Texas is actually filmed in neighboring New Mexico you know the director has a shaky grasp on his materials. When I saw Hell Or High Water in the theater I thought it was about two alcoholic idiots who sit on porches drinking beer before going out and committing violent acts. Seeing it recently on cable tv I realized it's actually about THREE alcoholic idiots who sit on porches drinking beer before going out and committing violent acts. Pine and Foster sling credible Southern accents, which is astonishing in a Hollywood film. Jeff Bridges merely regurgitates the accent and attitude of his last two movies, Crazy Heart and True Grit. (It was wearing thin in True Grit.) There are a number of good, funny, evocative lines in the film, most of them spoken by passers-by. The final scene is, however, a standout. It comes about an hour and thirty-nine minutes into a movie that runs an hour and forty-two minutes. The soundtrack is a good one. Watch the trailer, buy the soundtrack is my advice.

jonathan-harris17 On the face of it this is a standard cops-and-robbers bank heist tale, with a chalk/cheese pair of protagonists and a cliche edge-of-retirement lawman to give chase.The script here though is sharper than your average. Jeff Bridges (on form) as the lawman, pulls out zingers a-plenty and there's generally plenty of black humour to go around. A deft melding of the ol' Slow West (gun) stock with a modern layering of dead-end ghost towns and bank foreclosures: the huge Texan landscapes & skies, both entirely empty, the camera snaps up whenever the opportunity arises, the moody score (when not dipping into Country-Rock) and dialogue all contributing to the very definite feel of a moody mourning, like something in this world is lost or broken.Old fashioned American film-making, albeit from a Scottish director, I found this is a little lethargic to get going but by the end I was completely sold.

NormanCroucher David Mackenzie's neo-western is a eulogy on the death of the American west and the last of the cowboys. There is a wistful mood and a mournful tone, with a sense of loss at the heart of the piece, and in many ways the film is all about loss - the loss of family, the loss of time, the loss of money, the loss of dignity. It's a remarkably understated crime thriller that uses the architecture of the old cat-and-mouse chase formula to sketch a surprisingly realistic picture of criminality and desperation.A lot of this film's success can be credited to both Taylor Sheridan's lean but muscular screenplay and the wonderful cast of character actors performing his matter-of-fact dialogue. Chris Pine escapes the bland movie star folly of his career thus far and completely disappears under the skin of a wounded farmboy-turned- man-of-the-house, providing the pathos and heart to the story, while on screen brother Ben Foster's fraught energy provides the conflict and volatility. And then there is the ever dependable Jeff Bridges who mumbles and grumbles his way through a performance that feels completely authentic and effortless as he doggedly pursues the brothers while looking every inch the aged cowboy. It's a shame then that his character wasn't given more meat to his bones because, regardless of Bridges' low-key brilliance, the cop-in-pursuit subplot is where the movie is fundamentally lacking. At no point do our sympathies diverge away from the outlaw brothers to the Sheriff, unlike in Michael Mann's 'Heat' where both cop and robber were portrayed in equally sympathetic and interesting ways. Therefore, there is very little conflict within us come the inevitable showdown(s) between them and that robs us of experiencing the full breath of dramatic tension and emotional impact in the third act.There is still much to like in this film, even with a somewhat insubstantial subplot. To think that a simple story about cops and robbers can still work so well in these post-modern audience aware times is actually a testament to its level of craft and execution. I thought everything about the sub-genre had been pretty much exhausted, but 'Hell or High Water' proves, much like Bridges' grizzled performance, that there is life left in this old dog yet.