Benton shows some level of grit and surprise with "Bad Company," which is always interested in the impulsive ways of inexperienced men taking on an incredible challenge of self-preservation.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 23, 2025

Robert Benton’s Bad Company is a downbeat revisionist western that deflates generic mythmaking while also saying a few choice things about its own day.

| Aug 15, 2024

You can perceive the dazzle in the script, but what’s on the screen is pictorial and lifeless.

| Sep 21, 2023

It's a hard movie to summarize and a hard movie to forget -- soft-spoken, hard-headed, stylistically singular. Bad Company is good company, the best I have found at the movies in a long time.

| Jul 18, 2023

Jeff Bridges' overweening pride in his position of power is the perfect foil to Barry Brown's quiet, well-mannered approach.

| Sep 22, 2021

Despite some interesting ideas and some random achievements, "Bad Company" never really gets itself assembled.

| Sep 22, 2021

One of the year's most entertaining movies.

| Sep 22, 2021

While the film has the merit of originality and contains some adroitly written moments of ironic tragicomedy, it fails ultimately, mostly because it's entirely too replete with commercial ingredients to command our respect, or even our involvement.

| Sep 22, 2021

It's been far too long since we've had a Western as good and as authentic as "Bad Company."

| Sep 22, 2021

Robert Benton and David Newman, the writing team responsible for "Bonnie and Clyde," tell a simple story here in a simple, quietly convincing way.

| Sep 22, 2021

It's one of the most authentic westerns ever made, and that puts it in undisputably good company.

| Sep 22, 2021

Benton excels In creating the appropriately gritty frontier atmosphere for his characters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 22, 2021

As an evocation of the past, it's a remarkably successful venture for first-time director Robert Benton...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 22, 2021

A pleasant enough film, but taken as a whole it has about as much cohesion as a Bob Hope monologue.

| Jan 3, 2020

A highly engaging sleeper.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 29, 2010

Bad Company is an excellent film which combines wry humor and gritty action with in-depth characterizations of two youths on the lam in the Civil War west.

| Mar 26, 2009

The ironic comical Western prides itself in taking on the Horatio Alger myth.

| Original Score: B | Aug 5, 2008

[A] smart, character-driven Western that plays a little like the undercover cop genre.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 6, 2007

Benton's first film, a Western good enough to make everything he has done since seem disappointing by comparison.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 27, 2005