Like all great love stories, Ang Lee's is one of tragic romance, strongly acted by Heath Ledger as the most buttoned-up of cowboys, and Michelle Williams as his betrayed and enraged wife. full review

Ang Lee continues to astonish.

Both [Gyllenhaal and Ledger] embody what that old Waylon and Willie song taught us -- 'Cowboys ain't easy to love, and they're harder to hold.' full review

A sweeping, solemn, self-serious chronicle of their relationship over several decades. full review

It has become shorthand to call Brokeback Mountain the 'gay cowboy movie,' but it is much more than that glib description implies. This is a human story, a haunting film in the tradition of the great Hollywood romantic melodramas. full review

A film about love and the cost of lying that's exquisite in its beauty, painful in its truths. full review

The movie has a universal quality because it tells a story of unfulfilled lives and roots it in the well-observed specifics of a vanishing Western culture.

Like these indelible cowboys, you, too, may find it impossible not to succumb to the powerful, quiet greatness that is Brokeback Mountain. full review

Brokeback Mountain the power to break your heart -- and, perhaps more important, to open it. full review

With its measured pace and its sumptuous visuals, transforming a taboo into a romantic totem, this opening act is fascinating, like watching Red River with the subtext cranked way up. full review

If love does indeed conquer all, it should win hearts across America. If not, then its focus on a tragic stigma will remain as valid as its story suggests. full review

The reason to see Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, and see it you should, isn't its hot-button topicality or its cultural cachet but simply that it's a very good movie, with a staggeringly fine performance by Heath Ledger. full review

There's no contest. Brokeback Mountain is the most poignant movie love story of the year. full review

If the cowboy movies of John Wayne and John Ford were about the opening of the American West, Brokeback Mountain is the somber slam of its closing.

A good and eloquent Wyoming-set love story with a great performance at its heart. full review

Much as it is about love, Brokeback is also a potent study of repression that comes alive in Ledger's shattering performance.

A story of forbidden love on the range, Brokeback Mountain is acted, directed, written and photographed with heart-pounding beauty. full review

Brokeback Mountain is a love story, but that's not all it is. In some ways, the movie is as much about the way we were as the way they are. full review

The filmmakers have focused so intently and with such feeling on Jack and Ennis that the movie is as observant as work by Bergman. full review

I was never moved or even overly excited by what I finally witnessed on the screen, though I have no quarrel with the superlatives heaped upon the film by most of my colleagues. full review