The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Review

Dominik made an anti western about fame, which is why the killing itself is anticlimactic by design. Deakins used period style lenses with blurred and distorted edges for the exteriors, so the Missouri fields look like they are being remembered rather than seen, and the train robbery lit almost entirely by lantern and steam is among the finest sequences he has photographed. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis wrote a score of scraped strings that never once tells you how to feel.

Brad Pitt plays Jesse as a man performing his own legend and increasingly bored by it, and Casey Affleck's Robert Ford is the real subject, a hanger on whose adoration curdles into humiliation in real time. The narration is overused and occasionally explains what the images have already said. At one hundred and sixty minutes it is genuinely slow, and the final act following Ford's stage career tests patience even though it is thematically necessary. This is the most beautiful western of the century so far and the least interested in being one.