The Sisters Brothers Review

Coming to the western from outside it, Jacques Audiard treats every convention as something to be examined rather than performed, and the result is a soft, funny, melancholy film about two contract killers who are bad at sleeping outdoors. John C. Reilly carries it as Eli, the older brother who has started to want a shawl and a storefront, and his slow discovery of the toothbrush is the funniest thing in the picture.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Charlie as a drunk with no floor under him. Gyllenhaal's John Morris is the odd element, a fastidious scout narrating his own journal in a transatlantic accent borrowed from some other production, though the choice pays off once you see that Morris is performing gentility for men who cannot check his references.

Benoit Debie shoots the night work beautifully, the spider sequence and the glowing chemical in the river especially. What does not hold is the structure. The middle hour wanders between set pieces without building pressure, the dissolving formula is a convenience the story leans on twice, and the turn toward domestic tenderness at the end arrives so fast that it plays as a wish rather than a conclusion.