The story is appealing, the action is exciting and the expanse of scenery in VistaVision and Technicolor is truly awe-inspiring.

| Mar 25, 2024

Ford has achieved an extraordinary effect. There is the sense of time passing, yet the picture never drags. There is continued action, yet the picture conveys in almost leisurely fashion the life of isolated families in the remote early West.

| Mar 25, 2024

[The Searchers] is undoubtedly one of the greatest Westerns ever made. For sheer scope, guts and beauty I can think of no picture... to compare with it. In it John Wayne delivers a performance that tops his great performance in The High and the Mighty.

| Mar 25, 2024

The Searchers is a gripping bit of Americana that should appeal to all movie-goers.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 25, 2024

[John Wayne's] performance lacks either complexity or consistency. Instead of complexity, we get occasional nastiness alternating with guarded but essentially genial humour. The moods of the film are equally uneven.

| Mar 25, 2024

The Searchers, wherein Director John Ford again visits Arizona's Monument Valley, seeks but never completely captures an epic sweep. Frank Nugent's screen play... somehow fails to be consistently interesting.

| Mar 25, 2024

The combination of Director John Ford and star John Wayne has again produced a crack Western, the best since Shane, in The Searchers.

| Mar 25, 2024

While Ford has often probed the West for his dramas and his rare scenic panoramas, he seems in The Searchers to have penetrated more deeply than usual into life on the frontier.

| Mar 25, 2024

The Searchers may not be one of Ford's best, but its various recognizable ingredients have been stirred together by a hand that knows what it is doing and an imagination that can steer around most of the customary cliches.

| Mar 25, 2024

Visually beautiful, pretentious, dramatically wandering and downright dull.

| Mar 22, 2024

Wayne, always at home in the saddle, makes a fine bounceback from his embarrassing performance in The Conqueror. Hunter carries the picture well on those occasions when it's handed to him.

| Mar 22, 2024

In the character of the searcher even the experienced John Wayne can find little depth.

| Mar 22, 2024

Despite scene after scene of frustrated pursuit... Ford never ignores the great cinematic necessity, pace.

| Mar 22, 2024

The lapses in logic and the general air of incoherence are only minor imperfections in a film as carefully contrived as a matchstick castle.

| Mar 22, 2024

You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing.

| Mar 22, 2024

Rarely taken seriously as an actor, Wayne proved here, and in other films for Ford and Howard Hawks, that his often-ridiculed mannerisms of speech and walk could serve an unforgettable performance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 22, 2024

[The Searchers is] Ford's greatest western, with John Wayne as the relentless adventurer Ethan Edwards.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 5, 2019

It’s an endlessly surprising film, in large part because it starts out feeling like such a standard Hollywood Western... But then the film diverges from the expected action-rescue-revenge plot, and becomes bigger, wider, and sadder.

| Mar 19, 2018

Some fine vignettes of frontier life in the early southwest and a realistic presentation of the difficulties faced by the settlers in carving out a homestead in dangerous Indian country.

| Jun 27, 2007

Through the central image of the frontier, the meeting point of wilderness and civilization, Ford explores the divisions of our national character, with its search for order and its need for violence, its spirit of community and its quest for independence

| Jun 27, 2007