In addition to its excessive length and consequent slow pace the film has other liabilities... Nevertheless the characterizations are unusually solid and get more interesting as they go along.

| Nov 28, 2023

A marvelous motion picture.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 10, 2023

It's pure romantic bliss that feels about as far away from a political statement as you could imagine.

| Jul 21, 2023

A uniquely entertaining work of art.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Apr 27, 2023

There were times when I was won over by the laidback, folksy charm of some of the chat. Yet I can’t help but feel as though this would have functioned better if the acting had been top notch.

| Original Score: C | Feb 2, 2023

The glue of the film may be the supporting performances. There is no way “Rio Bravo” would be as good if not for Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Angie Dickinson.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

Few films have followed Western traditions with as much exhilarating craftsmanship, narrative and stylistic economy, or sheer escapist delight as Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

Rio Bravo is a soft, slack, not very rousing Western by a man (Howard Hawks) who knows better, having supervised a nearly endless chain of masterful journey films.

| Sep 15, 2021

Howard Hawks' direction is almost flawless with a tempo that injects humor, some dry some raucous, as a handy antibiotic for the story's frequent feverish outbursts of violence.

| Jun 23, 2020

'Rio Bravo' is one of the clearest samples of what could be called "Hawks style", a pinnacle of one of the three genres that the Indiana director handled with enviable style and ease: the western. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Apr 22, 2020

Director Howard Hawks, who made Red River in 1948, has come up with another big, handsome and entertaining western.

| Oct 30, 2019

It's long but involving, with an unexpectedly good performance from Dean Martin.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 26, 2018

Rio Bravo isn't a Fordian display of vast Western visas; the contours explored here are emotional.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 5, 2017

Underrated at the time of its release, this majestically paced western is one of the finest achievements of the genre and stands as a career-best for many of its participants.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 23, 2013

Warm, witty and endlessly welcoming, not only is it the filmmaker's finest Oater -- better even than the sparkling Red River -- it's arguably the quintessential Hawks flick.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 23, 2013

A definitive piece of Americana by way of Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo is what the late 1950s studio system was all about

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 23, 2013

The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission.

| Apr 23, 2013

To watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 23, 2013

[VIDEO] "Rio Bravo" (1959) is Howard Hawkes's shamelessly commercial Western.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 29, 2011

If Only Angels Have Wings is the foremost masterwork of the director's early period, Rio Bravo is that of the later, even more genial years.

| May 1, 2011