It’s a pretty movie starring two endlessly magnetic actors but it also feels like a self-conscious attempt to make a feminist Western by clumsily inserting characters with present-day values.

| Feb 5, 2025

The Dead Don't Hurt affirms the effectiveness of the [western] genre in the present, its impact on modern concepts such as justice or personal ethics, to once again sow that land of life and truth. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 5, 2025

The Dead Don't Hurt is more about the suffering of women in the Wild West, something that is not typically shown in cinema. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jan 17, 2025

...Mortensen stands out as a solid director who tells the story without haste and relies more on emotion than on dramatic effects, on deep dialogue...rather than those about revenge and the imposition of law and order at any cost.[ Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 14, 2025

The film's cinematography is worthy of the most traditional westerns, although the story, with its more modern tone, gives it a personal stamp that Viggo Mortensen seems to want to capture. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 13, 2025

A western where a woman can hold her own against the male culture.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 9, 2025

Insightful and refreshing, this elegant revisionist western about an unconventional pioneering couple still offers many of the familiar pleasures of the traditional western

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 11, 2024

Mortensen’s second feature as writer-director offers a distinctive proposition about what a 21st-century Western could be. At best, he succeeds in tapping into the gentler, more lyrical side of the genre in the spirit of classic Hollywood directors.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2024

Mortensen is great as always in front of the camera, and the ever-underrated Krieps matches him in each of their shared scenes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2024

...an inspired, quietly mesmeric work...

| Original Score: 19/20 | Nov 28, 2024

It’s refreshing to watch a movie in 2024 that use the western genre without subverting it, inverting it, or reinventing it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 2, 2024

The Dead Don't Hurt is a clear labour of love and a throwback to an earlier era of Western, for better and worse.

| Aug 27, 2024

The whole cast is outstanding, but Krieps ... stands out with her nuanced performance as a strong woman trying to hold her own in an unmerciful world dominated by men. Despite this setting, though, Mortensen is able ... to find beauty amid the violence.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 17, 2024

Mortensen... clearly has an adoration for the traditional aesthetic of the Western genre (then again, it should have been immediately obvious from the fact that there is literally a main character called Weston in the script).

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 5, 2024

It’s a beautiful, subtle, patient moment of love found and love shared.

| Aug 1, 2024

In its unconventional narrative structure and its tender perspective on a brutal era, Mortensen’s film acts as a mirror of his own public persona: tightly drawn, deeply felt, refreshingly unconventional.

| Jul 26, 2024

There’s something extremely admirable about its individuality, its lack of concern with following current fashion. The Dead Don’t Hurt is a movie that is wholly itself, and asks you to meet it on its terms, not the other way around.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 24, 2024

Aside from its creative timeline this is a standard and serviceable Western that will likely be of most appeal to preexisting fans of the genre.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 24, 2024

The Dead Don’t Hurt proves the Western ain’t dead.

| Jul 19, 2024

Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt is a tender tale about ordinary people trying to settle in the Old West.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 19, 2024