Down in the Valley Critic Reviews

Edward Norton serves as lead actor and producer, but even his star power won't help this misfire reach a wide domestic audience.Read the full review

For a film that has allegedly undergone extensive tinkering following its premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Down in the Valley abounds in nagging loose ends and suffers overall from logy pacing.Read the full review

In the end, it's really just a thriller, slower than most, with pockets of dead time but with a few extra flourishes, too, thanks to Norton.Read the full review

As long as Norton plays Harlan as a modern-day Joe Buck, a kind of four-in-the-afternoon cowboy, we're drawn by his waltz of innocence and vagueness. But Down in the Valley turns out to be one of those films with a thick, gummy overlay of Western ''mythology.''Read the full review

Down in the Valley is a wild thing that sticks with you long after it's over. You know, a real movie.Read the full review

When a movie begins to present one implausible or unwise decision after another, when its world plays too easily into the hands of its story, when the taste for symbolism creates impossible scenes, we grow restless.Read the full review

Result is imperfect and overlong, but hugely ambitious and often breathtaking.Read the full review

It's mysterious and bold at every turn, and refreshingly removed from the commonplace.Read the full review

Begins semirealistically, then veers off course, hurtling into the wild blue yonder of myth and allegory. On the way to a climactic shootout that begins on the set of a Hollywood western and ends on a foggy hillside, it makes several screeching, hairpin turns.Read the full review