Avis Metacritic

It's American filmmaking at its finest—clean, clear, and direct—and it's also the most optimistic masterpiece on film, valiantly shoring fragments against human ruin.

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.

Directed by Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo has its fair share of gunfights and saloon showdowns (including a bravura opening confrontation that unfolds with barely any words). Yet the film resembles other Westerns less than it does Hawks’ snappy romances, such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and To Have and Have Not.

Rio Bravo is an excellent film featuring strong, proud, but very human characters who fight against their various handicaps and pull together to do a job and do it right.

Rio Bravo features characters who form a familial bond while performing an impossible task in the face of death. It is, in other words, a Howard Hawks movie. It's a great one, too, and if it's not Hawks' best, it's certainly the most Hawksian.

Bravo shines with humor and character. [28 Jul 2006, p.C10]

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.

Beautifully acted, wonderfully observed, and scripted with enormous wit and generosity, it's the sort of film, in David Thomson's words, which reveals that 'men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world'.

Producer-director Howard Hawks makes handsome use of force in logically unravelling his hard-hitting narrative, creating suspense at times and occasionally inserting lighter moments to give variety.

Despite its slickness, virility, occasional humor and, if it may be repeated, authentic professional approach, it is well-made but awfully familiar fare.