It can be a bit clunky especially with its use of time lapses and setting changes. But if you’re able to navigate those storytelling hurdles “Les Cowboys” gives you plenty of emotional meat to chew on.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 23, 2022

It delivers a familiar genre tale while simultaneously diffusing and dissecting its meaning. With its sudden plot turns and jumps in time, the film is something of a melodramatic mini-epic that is also an arthouse provocation.

| Jan 6, 2021

[Les Cowboys] developed a similar plot hook to ultimately devastating, near-epic effect...

| Nov 10, 2020

Les Cowboys never gets out of the gate because, as a character-based drama, it fails to provide a single character worth investing in.

| May 25, 2019

It's hard to dismiss something this visceral and ambitious, even if it doesn't necessarily work.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2019

It's a lot to process, though never dull.

| Aug 29, 2017

Though the ending deviates from The Searchers, it definitely plays like a comment on John Ford's enduring, if racially discomforting classic.

| Aug 18, 2017

Less a treatise on extremism than an exploration of western fears and prejudices, this is potent and provocative - and packs a skin-prickling finale.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 3, 2017

This is an intense, thoughtful film about family, obsession and man's search for grace in a world gone mad.

| Dec 4, 2016

A drama where the echoes of western are clear and puts on the table, once again, the futility of the system in a kidnapping case. [Full review in Spanish]

| Oct 11, 2016

It succeeds in humanizing the world's biggest political football without taking sides. No easy task, but the impartiality robs the story of any emotional or rooting interest.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 31, 2016

A hybridized, John Ford-infused, French Western from writer of Jacques Audiard films.

| Original Score: B plus | Jul 29, 2016

It takes a lot of confidence for a director to pay homage to John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956), and in the case of Thomas Bidegain's "Les Cowboys" it is not altogether unwarranted.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 28, 2016

While the film's allusive structure demands a viewer's concentration, it rewards the effort with a timely message about overcoming the fear of the other and a quietly moving conclusion.

| Original Score: B | Jul 22, 2016

...it doesn't really succeed even as a chilly intellectual exercise, and it most certainly does not succeed as a film.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Jul 1, 2016

A most strangely crafted western of sorts pertaining to identities, families, and senses of belonging all lost, perhaps eventually to be regained.

| Jun 30, 2016

Bidegain and cinematographer Arnaud Potier speak multitudes with wide-angle, slow-panning shots that immerse us in a post-9/11 quagmire that's never less than utterly personal.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 30, 2016

"Les Cowboys" keeps you off-kilter from the start.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 30, 2016

Unlike Ford's masterpiece, I didn't feel aesthetically stimulated or emotionally rewarded after watching it. Ultimately the film seems at a loss for what it wants to say.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 29, 2016

The terrain traversed by Thomas Bidegain's Les Cowboys is so familiar in European movies it could be clich by now. That is, if it weren't also the undeniable, postmodern State of Things, the new global normal.

| Jun 29, 2016