the sister brothers movie review

The Sisters Brothers

Who would have thought that Jacques Audiard , the French director of slow-burn, humanistic character studies would one day take on one of the most characteristically American of genres, the Western, with his English-language debut? While worlds apart from his socially realist “ Dheepan ” and “Rust and Bone,” Audiard’s “The Sisters Brothers” sports a similarly closely watched, leaned in sensitivity with its brotherly story. Adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel (by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain ) and infused with sweetness, graphic body horror (that, at times, spins a childlike icky humor) and a high body count, this alcohol-soaked Frontier road trip constantly reinvents itself at every turn in fun, witty and ultimately touching ways. Call it a revisionist or an absurdist Western if you will, but Audiard’s film feels both refreshingly new (without ever going to the extreme lengths the Zellner Brothers did with “ Damsel ”) and nostalgically familiar.

The backdrop is the Gold Rush, which is said to have made a Sherriff’s job much easier: if there’s trouble, you follow the gold to get to the source of the unrest. But when we meet the central brothers Eli ( John C. Reilly , goofy, soulful and great at physical comedy as ever) and Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix , quietly enigmatic) one random dark night at the start of the film, there doesn’t seem to be any wealth to be pursued. With the playful last name “Sisters,” the pair of cold-blooded hit-men, without much thought about the consequences of their actions, murder a household of people in a tightly orchestrated set piece of nocturnal shootouts. The reason remains unknown—with this job and everything else, the ruthless duo answers to a much feared, mostly unseen mysterious crime boss called ‘The Commodore’ and habitually assassinates their way through the 1850s Oregon. Along the way, they bond and trivially bicker about life as casually as they kill.

But just when the soft-edged Eli starts contemplating his future and ongoing profession despite the unaffected heavy drinker Charlie’s shrugs, The Commodore sets them up for a new task. They will tail and kill a criminal called Hermann Kemit Warm ( Riz Ahmed , cheekily mysterious) for reasons we would slowly piece together later—for now, he is just a thieving enemy who once betrayed their boss. Enter Morris ( Jake Gyllenhaal , reuniting with Ahmed after “ Nightcrawler ”), a British-accented bounty hunter for hire, tasked with delivering Warm to the brothers. But then the prospect of immediate wealth turns tables for everyone involved—the brainy chemist Warm’s creamy invention that makes gold glaringly appear in water, redefines priorities at once. The two pairs, traced on parallel storylines for a while (that admittedly slows down the film’s previously absorbing rhythm), find themselves entangled in a ploy against each other. Along the way, local madams, kindly prostitutes, further the accidentally amusing events and some dead horses unfortunately enter the story, sharpening the film’s tone as an original yet studied homage to its genre.

A delightful tale of familial ties balanced well with a slick cat-and-mouse yarn, “The Sisters Brothers” owes much of its breezy charm to John C. Reilly, whose comic timing does wonders for the meatiest and most multifaceted character of the ensemble. Phoenix feels right at home in Charlie’s quieter shoes, while Gyllenhaal’s familiarly on-edge persona and a mischievous turn from Ahmed impress. Reilly and Phoenix demonstrate tremendous chemistry throughout—we buy both their longtime amity and occasional callousness, especially when the script drip-feeds the brothers’ back-story into the narrative. In this bittersweet tale with a sentimental heart, and among a dangerous milieu of blood, greed and spiders (one in particular that causes the film’s biggest gross-out moment), Audiard’s characteristically sensitive touch gradually lifts familial emotions, letting them linger in the air long after the credits roll. 

This review was originally filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9th.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

• Joaquin Phoenix as Charlie Sisters
• Jake Gyllenhaal as John Morris
• Carol Kane as Mrs. Sisters
• Riz Ahmed as Hermann Kermit Warm
• Rutger Hauer as Commodore
• John C. Reilly as Eli Sisters
• Alexandre Desplat

Cinematographer

• Benoît Debie
• Jacques Audiard
• Thomas Bidegain
• Juliette Welfling

Writer (based on the book by)

• Patrick Dewitt

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The Sisters Brothers

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Rent The Sisters Brothers on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Apple TV.

What to Know

The Sisters Brothers rides familiar genre trails in occasionally unexpected ways - a satisfying journey further elevated by its well-matched leading men.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Jacques Audiard

John C. Reilly

Eli Sisters

Joaquin Phoenix

Charlie Sisters

Jake Gyllenhaal

John Morris

Hermann Kermit Warm

Rebecca Root

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Review: Blood Is Never Simple in ‘The Sisters Brothers’

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By Manohla Dargis

• Sept. 20, 2018

The first time you see Eli and Charlie Sisters, they are raining down death in the night. It’s 1851, somewhere in the Oregon Territory, and the sky is as black as a bottomless well. Voices and gunfire puncture the gloom as Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) descend, entering a cabin and shooting dead one man after another. By the time the ground is littered with corpses, a nearby barn has caught fire and so has a stable of unfortunate horses. We sure messed that up, Eli ruefully observes as the uneasy antiheroes of “The Sisters Brothers” are swallowed up by darkness.

The French director Jacques Audiard (“ A Prophet ”), making his English-language debut, grabs you quickly in a busily plotted movie that tracks the Sisters as they pursue others. They work for the Commodore (a foreboding Rutger Hauer), an enigmatic kingpin with an apparently limitless number of enemies for Eli and Charlie to hunt down. The sly, smiley Charlie is the Commodore’s favorite and perhaps the movie’s, too, just because killing comes naturally to him. The brothers have an appetite for destruction, but only Eli gets indigestion. Delicately played by Mr. Reilly, who opens up his character one emotion at a time, Eli is a seeming conundrum; he’s also the movie’s ace in the hole.

Westerns were made for bloodshed, and “The Sisters Brothers” delivers as expected. After some fussing and narrative table setting — the Commodore makes Charlie the lead man on their next assignment, creating some jokey sibling jostling — the movie settles back down to its deadly business. The brothers are to meet John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), a detective the Commodore has hired to track down Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed). It’s unclear what the Commodore wants with Hermann and whether he’s been aggrieved or robbed. Like the audience, Eli has been left in the dark about some details, a shared ignorance that hints where our sympathies should land.

The mission, as Charlie likes to call the hunt, grows tricky. Adapted for the screen by Mr. Audiard and Thomas Bidegain from the novel by Patrick deWitt , the narrative soon forks. As Charlie and Eli gallop toward gold-rushing California (the movie was shot in Spain and Romania), the story begins to regularly switch over to John and Hermann, who meet in a frontier settlement. John, a gentleman graced with one of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s mysterious accents, has been tracking Hermann but not nearly stealthily enough. Hermann reaches his hand out to John, having assumed that he might have found a kindred spirit, someone with whom he can speak and commune.

Hermann guesses right. He and John rapidly join forces, and Eli and Charlie are now pursuing two quarries, not one. Each set of men seems to represent starkly different worlds, as if they were emissaries from civilization and its discontents. John and Hermann speak in soft, measured voices made for drawing-room deliberations. They have stories that emerge vaguely, having gone West like so many others. Western natives, Eli and Charlie behave and speak roughly, their exchanges laced with profanity. The vulgarities never reach the poetically baroque excesses of the HBO show “ Deadwood ,” but they are vivid enough to put distance between them and genre exemplars like John Wayne.

Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in “The Sisters Brothers,” which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them. Certainly, it doesn’t come across as a self-conscious revisionist western, an often meaningless category that implies that genres remain static or, worse, that latter-day westerns are more complex than earlier ones. Tell it to John Ford, whose career spanned much of the 20th century and whose westerns varied accordingly.

For much of the movie, Mr. Audiard instead seems content to play with genre tropes. He lingers on its mud and its blood, making each glisten. He slips in an occasional iris shot and liquid slow motion, and folds in ideas about brotherhood, masculinity and the catastrophic, perhaps unpayable debt exacted by a violent past. Eli and Charlie’s pursuit gives the movie urgency and visual appeal as open vistas give way to snowy mountains, the dirty streets of San Francisco and a wilderness that prospectors are rapidly spoiling. The brothers also visit a saloon where Charlie gets drunk while Eli hires a prostitute ( Allison Tolman ), but this is no movie for women, who just embroider its edges.

In time, Eli and Charlie catch up with John and Hermann, leading to the most sustained pleasurable interlude. A great deal of the movie’s enjoyment comes from its four principals, who work well when paired off but are particularly appealing in a group. After expediently bonding in a gunfight, the four characters settle into a little bit of paradise and an easy camaraderie that suggests what kind of world they could build together. For a while, Charlie, an often voluble, charismatic psychopath, even quiets down, allowing the men to drink, laugh and think about the Utopia that John and Hermann hope to build. They want to build it in Dallas, a dream of a future that is as absurd as it is tragically doomed.

The Sisters Brothers Rated R for sustained gun violence and a seriously gruesome medical procedure. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute.

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‘the sisters brothers’: film review | venice 2018.

John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed star in 'The Sisters Brothers,' French director Jacques Audiard's first English-language effort.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The jovially titled The Sisters Brothers would have felt very much at home among the gorgeous, idiosyncratic revisionist Westerns of the early 1970s. What this will mean to audiences 45 years on is another question. This first English-language outing by the ever-adventurous French director Jacques Audiard ( A Prophet , Rust and Bone ) is a connoisseur’s delight, as it’s boisterously acted and detailed down to its last bit of shirt stitching. A sterling cast, led by John C. Reilly in the sort of starring role he’s been waiting for his whole career, will give this a certain profile in specialized release and down the line in home viewing venues.

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As are many classic Westerns, this is a tale of pursuit and patience involving a long journey and threats known and unknown. There will also be blood, of course, vast changes of fortune and the decisive matters of chance, daring and luck.

Release date: Sep 21, 2018

The Sisters Brothers possesses all of the above, in addition to the curiosity of a filmmaker who has clearly taken great relish in exploring a country that is both familiar (via countless movies) and now quite distant.

For the genre faithful, it’s almost always rewarding to see the classic form being tackled by an interested outsider. Audiard, working from the well regarded 2011 novel by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, keeps things interesting all the way by virtue of his clear desire to make everything here feel built from scratch. Much as with such 1970s Western refreshers as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Hired Hand and  Bad Company, you can feel the filmmaker’s zeal to make contact with the real Old West through the obligatory mythic passageway provided by the cinema. These films never drew a substantial public, and the same will likely be true again here, even as there are many pleasures to be had.

As with most Westerns, the story is simple: A big shot named The Commodor (Rutger Hauer) wants a foreign outsider prospector by the name of Hermann Kermit Warm ( Riz Ahmed ) to be killed for stealing. To this end he engages a brother assassin act by the unlikely name of Eli and Charlie Sisters (Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix ).

Alert to the danger, Warm takes on protection in the form of lawman/detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhal), setting off a pursuit of untold miles and time. This set-up naturally provides excuses to cover vast tracts of unspoiled land, just what any Western needs, as the tale moves from heavily wooded Oregon down along the California coast to San Francisco in high Gold Rush dudgeon.

The two parties are a study in contrasts. Warm is something seemingly new in Westerns, a Middle Eastern prospector, a dentist by profession, while Gyllenhaal’s lawman is unusually eloquent, perhaps a victim of over-education. The Sisters boys are of a notably lower status, rougher and gruffer but not without a rollicking appeal.

The film works up an only moderate sense of momentum over the first hour at least, with the greatest pleasures emanating from the variety of landscapes (Spanish and Romanian locations pass impressively as the Far West) and the feints and jabs of the four men, both in the direction of opponents and one another. Unlike many Westerns of yore, these are not men of few words; they’re idiosyncratic, even highly articulate at times, which goes hand in hand with the invigorating stores of intelligence with which the writers have endowed the four men.

It’s hard to tell how long the pursuit goes on, but at the film’s halfway point the Sisters arrive at the Pacific (reminding at one point of the unforgettable Oceanside interlude in One-Eyed Jacks ), and shortly thereafter at San Francisco, in the instant splendor and madness of its Gold Rush heyday. “This place is Babylon,” one of the brothers exclaims, as they indulge in a fancy hotel and get a load of flush toilets and gold-trimmed restaurants.

It’s during this spell by the Bay that the Sisters, and the film, take a fateful turn, as Eli proposes ditching the Commodore, thinking they can do better on their own. “We have a chance to get out,” he insists to his unconvinced brother, creating a rift that leads the tale to its inevitable rendezvous with violence. What eventually comes to pass is both unsettling and, finally, quite satisfying.

Reilly has the most expansive character here and he makes it his own, breathing deep stores of boisterous life into him. Phoenix provides a willing, if less assertive younger brother accomplice who is obliged by birth to be a second banana, while Gyllenhal and Ahmed are attractive, but rather less attention-grabbing saddlemates.

Physically, the film is a fine specimen, with production designer Michel Barthelemy and costume designer Milena Canonero providing unusually rich and detailed contributions. Alexandre Desplat’s score is icing on the cake.

Venue: Venice Film Festival

Opens: September 21 (U.S.) Annapurna

Production: Annapurna, Page 114, Why Not Productions, Michael De Luca Productions

Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal , Riz Ahmed, Rutger Hauer

Director: Jacques Audiard

Screenwriters: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel by Patrick deWitt

Producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Gregoire Sorlat, Michel Merkt, Megan Ellison, Michael De Luca, Alison Dickey, John C. Reilly

Executive producers: Chelsea Barnard, Tudor Reu, Sammy Scher

Director of photography: Benoit Debie

Production designer: Michel Barthelemy

Costume designer: Milena Canonero

Editor: Juliette Welfing

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Casting: Francine Maisler, Cristel Baras, Mathilde Snodgrass

121 minutes

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The Sisters Brothers

Eli and Charlie Sisters, an infamous duo of gunslinging assassins, chase a gold prospector and his unexpected ally in 1850s Oregon. Eli and Charlie Sisters, an infamous duo of gunslinging assassins, chase a gold prospector and his unexpected ally in 1850s Oregon. Eli and Charlie Sisters, an infamous duo of gunslinging assassins, chase a gold prospector and his unexpected ally in 1850s Oregon.

• Jacques Audiard
• Thomas Bidegain
• Patrick DeWitt
• John C. Reilly
• Joaquin Phoenix
• Jake Gyllenhaal
• 385 User reviews
• 219 Critic reviews
• 78 Metascore
• 13 wins & 22 nominations

Top cast 39

• Eli Sisters

• Charlie Sisters

• John Morris

• Hermann Kermit Warm

• Girl Mayfield Saloon

• The Commodore

• Mrs Sisters

• Blount Guy Dying
• (as Zack Abbott)

• Relay Owner

• Storekeeper Pioneer Town 2

• Quarrel Saloon Guy Town 02
• Woman with the Bortsch

• Horse Dealer Town 03

• Horse Dealer Relay 02

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia Filmed in Romania, France and Spain. Despite the film's American setting, none of the footage was shot in the United States.
• Goofs After Charlie Sisters visits the claims office in San Francisco, he tells Eli that the men they are looking for are at Folsom Lake on the American River. Folsom Lake didn't exist until Folsom Dam was built on the South Fork of the American River in 1955.

John Morris : I left my family out of hatred and that my father was the person I despised most in this world. I despised everything about him. I sincerely thought I had been freed of all that until tonight. Listening to you, what do I realize? That most of the things that I thought I'd been doing these past years, freely the opinions that I thought I had of my own volition were in fact dictated by my hatred towards that man. I'm 35 years old and my life is like an empty cylinder.

• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Another Top 10 Joaquin Phoenix Performances (2019)

User reviews 385

• Sep 21, 2018
• How long is The Sisters Brothers? Powered by Alexa
• What was the chemical Warm was dumping in the water?
• October 19, 2018 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official site
• Les frères Sisters
• Why Not Productions
• Annapurna Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $38,000,000 (estimated)
• Sep 23, 2018
• $13,143,056

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes

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Film Review: ‘The Sisters Brothers’

Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly are sibling troubleshooters in a Western ramble that's witty and watchable yet still a touch wearying.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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The staggering lack of gender parity in this year’s Venice Film Festival competition slate — a grand total of 21 films, only one of which was directed by a woman — has produced a pledge, on the part of the festival, to correct that situation in the future. That’s a good start, yet it’s worth pondering why the numbers were so egregiously off in the first place. The most obvious question to ask is: Could every film that wound up in the competition really have been “better” than every last film, directed by a woman, that was submitted and rejected? Like many observers, I overwhelmingly suspect that the answer is no.

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I thought of this, in light of the competition line-up, when I saw “ The Sisters Brothers ,” a violent Western picaresque that rambles and rough-rides like some quirky horse opera from the ’70s — but since it no longer is the ’70s, it plays a lot slower. The movie, which is one of the 21 competition films, stars Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as the Sisters brothers, notorious sibling outlaws who work for an Oregon City mobster known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer, who is seen only from a distance and has no lines).

The brothers are his hitmen, trouble-shooting fixers, and thugs of all trades. Eli Sisters (Reilly) is the older and more responsible of the two, and also the more fretful, while Charlie Sisters (Phoenix) is a drunk who carries an attitude of jovial recklessness. The two take the piss out of each other on a daily basis but also work together like a well-oiled six-gun. They’re heartlessly efficient killers who can drop into any situation, and after firing away — the gun shots on the soundtrack are notably blasty and intense — will always leave a trail of corpses.

The movie traces the gradual unraveling of Eli and Charlie’s sibling-killer act after the Commodore gives them a routine assignment. A man named Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) has run out on a debt; he’s being pursued by a detective ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) who’s contracted to deliver him to the brothers. Hermann, a would-be prospector with a background in chemistry, has invented a formula that’s pure gold: an acidic liquid that, when poured into a river, will light up any gold rocks in it. The brothers are supposed to retrieve Hermann, torture him until he gives up the formula, then kill him. But along the way, the detective, played by Gyllenhaal as a friendly dandy who speaks in a ridiculously cultivated accent, winds up bonding with Hermann, and the two decide to become business partners.

Riz Ahmed plays Hermann with his usual commanding snap, and we want to see him succeed. Yet “The Sisters Brothers” has a rough-and-tumble absurdist cynicism about it. It keeps dragging its characters down, sort of the way the Coen brothers might, though with more ferocity and less style. There’s a lot of grueling hardship on display. A large spider crawls into Eli’s gullet while he’s sleeping, causing him to get sick, and the brothers take major punches at each other (Charlie compares Eli’s left hook to being whacked with a shovel). When they finally catch up to Hermann and Gyllenhaal’s John Morris, they’re beaten down enough to join forces with them — which seems like it might be a slightly lazy sentimental turn, and is, until you see what happens when too much of Hermann’s chemical formula gets poured into a river. It is not pretty.

“The Sisters Brothers” is too light to be a true drama and too heavy to be a comedy. It’s that timeless movie thing, a lark , and on that level it works just fine. But it’s a lark that plods on more than it takes wing. It’s a movie that makes even its own glimmer of originality feel slightly musty. Nothing wrong with that. But it does get you wondering if there’s another film that might have brought the Venice competition more adventure.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Competition), Sept. 2, 2018. Running time: 120 MIN.

• Production: An Annapurna Pictures release of a Why Not Productions, Annapurna Pictures, Page 114 Productions, KNM, Michael De Luca Productions, Top Drawer Entertainment, France 2 Cinéma, France 3 Cinéma, UGC, Apache Films, Mobra Films, Les Films du Fleuve production. Producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Michael De Luca, Alison Dickey, Megan Ellison, Michel Merkt, Cristian Mungiu, John C. Reilly, Grégoire Sorlat, Executive producers: Chelsea Barnard, Tudor Reu, Sammy Scher.
• Crew: Director: Jacques Audiard. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain. Camera (color, widescreen): Benoît Debie. Editor: Juliette Welfling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.
• With: Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Rutger Hauer, Carol Kane.

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‘The Sisters Brothers’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly Star in the Most Sensitive Western Ever Made — Venice

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“ The Sisters Brothers ” is a sensitive western about brotherly love that just happens to revolve around stone-cold murderers. It’s a context that requires an original approach to the genre, and that’s exactly what veteran French director Jacques Audiard brings to his first English-language effort. However, in retrospect, Audiard is a natural fit: With movies like “Dheepan” and “A Prophet,” Audiard makes rich character studies about people trying to do the right thing in a world stacked against them, and nothing in American mythology provides a better template for exploring that crisis than the Wild West. However, it’s the stirring chemistry between Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as committed siblings that transforms these lively, violent circumstances into a sweet and intimate journey designed to catch acolytes of the genre off-guard.

Based on Patrick Dewitt’s 2011 novel, “The Sisters Brothers” unfolds against the backdrop of the Gold Rush, though the historical context is secondary to the narrative it sets in motion. In the first frame, titular Sisters brothers Charlie (Phoenix) and Eli (Reilly) emerge from nighttime shadows to massacre an entire house full of targets. Employed by an enigmatic gangster known as The Commodore (Rutger Hauer, in a fleeting but welcome cameo), the brothers careen across the barren landscape juggling various missions to murder men for reasons irrelevant to their plight. It’s a subversive adventure story about the supposed bad guys, a hit-man comedy by way of Peckinpah, and remarkable for the way it makes the familiar backdrop so appealing from the start.

For the hard-drinking Charlie, this endless killing spree is a justification unto itself; the gentler Eli, however, has started to question the underlying purpose of their missions. Little by little, the focused script (credited to Audiard and Thomas Bidegan) reveals details about this odd pair and the history of their bloody career path; so long as the movie hovers in the center of this dynamic, it remains a fascinating exploration of an unusual family bond.

“The Sisters Brothers” mines so much substance out its central characters that it falters when it cuts away from them. When the brothers are hired to track down a supposed thief named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, wearing a classy mustache and an inviting grin), the story shifts to his experiences with Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), the bounty hunter who nabs Hermann under the auspices of delivering him to the killers. Sporting a peculiar British accent that makes his lopsided “Okja” character look normal, Gyllenhaal stands out as odd variable in this otherwise credible scenario, though his scenes with Hermann develop their own sense of intrigue. It turns out the alleged criminal actually has a water-based formula with the ability to make gold appear in river beds, and its financial prospects appeal to Morris enough that he decides to become his prisoner’s business partner as they plot to foil the Sisters brothers when they arrive.

But really, this scenario sets in motion more complications for the brothers to escape, as they continue to contend with the broader existential question of what they should do with their time. Enduring harsh conditions on the road between Oregon and California, the Sisters spend much of the movie saving each other from physical harm, whether it’s abrasive spider bites or drunken saloon showdowns, and it’s so endearing to watch them survive each new twist that it renders broader stakes irrelevant. There’s an Altmanesque quality to the way Audiard builds out this world, with the ever-reliable Alexandre Desplat’s jangly score and Benoit Debie’s warm, painterly visuals opening up the brothers’ journeys to the boundless possibilities of the frontier. It almost seems as though they could keep at it forever, but every messy gunfight inches them closer to the possibility that time is running out.

About those gunfights: While Audiard has never made a proper action movie, many of his credits have a brutal, physical intensity, from the grotesque prison showdowns of “A Prophet” to the street brawls of “Rust and Bone” and the Rambo-like militant finale of “Dheepan,” from which Audiard drew on “The Wild Bunch.” To that end, he excels at constructing the most intense sequences of the movie. Filled with jolting sound design and clever misdirection, the shootouts in “The Sisters Brothers” have a sustained potency and remain unpredictable until the very last moments, much like the brothers themselves.

Reilly, who also produced the movie, tends to strike a distinctive tone between goofball and gentleman, a balance that makes his character here so likable from the outset. In a standout moment at a brothel, he attempts to engage in the most kindhearted sexual role-playing in film history, and his bedroom antics are so lovable the prostitute (“Fargo” Season 1 star Allison Tolman) is led to tears; next door, of course, an inebriated Eli’s wrecking havoc on cue. The sad-funny balance of this sequence epitomizes the movie’s endearing tone.

Phoenix, buried behind his usual scrappy beard, peers out at every twist with the same wild eyes that have become his trademark. A sort of companion piece to his emo hitman in Lynn Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here” earlier this year, Phoenix plays Eli as the ultimate foil to his brother’s measured world view: Whereas Charlie constantly worries about his behavior, Eli never hesitates to maintain control of a situation — in a scene that finds the brothers facing down the barrels of a few guns at once, a typically sloshed Eli stares back at their foes and confidently vomits before taking them out.

While not every turn of events remains so involving, the siblings remain a key selling point, as the title of “The Sisters Brothers” provides a template for examining one of its core themes: This most masculine of genres often takes masculinity for granted, but “The Sisters Brothers” doesn’t let its tough guys off the hook. They’re vivid, emotional beings, the products of troubled upbringings who live hand-to-mouth the only way they know how. When they finally come around to confronting a major figure from their past, it arrives as a kind of spiritual awakening, the cinematic equivalent of watching a grown man cry.

“The Sisters Brothers” premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. Annapurna Pictures releases it theatrically on September 21.

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The Sisters Brothers review: New western is a reassuringly old-fashioned affair

Jacques audiard’s film remains engaging thanks to its exceptional central performances from john c reilly and joaquin phoenix , article bookmarked.

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Director Jacques Audiard, 122 mins, starring: John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Allison Tolman. Cert 15

Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers follows in a long tradition of European-made westerns. It has a primarily American cast, a French director and was shot in Spain. Its producers include everyone from its star, John C Reilly , to Belgian arthouse auteurs, the Dardenne brothers. In spite of its mongrel background, this is a reassuringly old-fashioned affair. Audiard isn’t trying to reinvent the western or to use it to make telling points about today’s society or how America has lost its way. Instead, in adapting Patrick deWitt’s Booker Prize-nominated novel for the screen, he is paying affectionate homage to a genre he clearly admires. There is plenty of humour and philosophising here but the basic ingredients aren’t that different to those found in the films of Raoul Walsh or John Ford.

Reilly’s performance as Eli Sisters, the older of the two brothers, is similar to his Oliver Hardy in the recent Stan & Ollie . He is a superb comic actor who knows just how to switch between humour and pathos. In one beautifully staged scene, we see Eli here fast asleep by the campfire as a spider crawls over his face. His mouth is wide open and so we know exactly where the spider is headed. Reilly also extracts maximum comic capital out of the scenes involving his discovery of one of the great new inventions of the modern age, namely the toothbrush.

Eli’s partner is his brother, Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix), who drinks far too much and gets terrible hangovers which cause him to vomit or fall off his horse. Eli and Charlie are quite the comic double act – or would be, if it wasn’t for their line of work. They’re killers for hire.

Audiard gives the film an elegiac feel that the brothers’ clowning does nothing to dissipate. Like hired guns in most westerns, the Sisters brothers have a very fatalistic approach to life. Eli may talk about retiring and opening up a store but Charlie realises that such a notion is completely fanciful given the trail of violence the brothers have left behind them. They’ve killed so many people they half expect retribution will soon be coming their way. Every victim has a father or brother who wants vengeance. If the brothers double cross their mysterious employer, “The Commodore”, other killers will be put on their trail.

The film begins in brutal and murky fashion with a night-time shootout that takes place in the pitch dark. It is hard to make out what is going on until suddenly the landscape is illuminated by a horse covered in flames galloping across the plains. (A barn has caught fire.) Both brothers are ruthless. They have no qualms about killing men already wounded and begging for mercy.

Although the body count is very high, Audiard doesn’t trivialise the violence. When someone is shot, we’ll hear a sickening sound as the bullet knocks the victim backwards.

The film is set in the early 1850s, at the height of Gold Rush fever. The Commodore has sent Eli and Charlie in pursuit of a chemist/prospector called Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who appears to have discovered a failsafe formula for detecting gold. Warm is also being pursued by a very dapper detective, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who keeps a diary, likes to quote Thoreau and is prey to existential despair. (He feels his life is like “an empty cylinder”.) The idea is to catch Warm, torture him and get the secret of his formula from him.

Most of the characters here come from troubled families. Eli and Charlie have the “foul blood” of their violent, drunken father running through their veins. Morris is likewise tormented by memories of childhood trauma. Very few women feature in the film, and those who do appear are strictly stock types: the saloon bar madam, the sweet-natured prostitute or the kindly old mother.

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The chemist Warm turns out to be an idealist who dreams of using his formula not to get rich himself but to finance a utopian community. We know, though, that this is only a pipe dream.

As the Sisters brothers ride for days on end in pursuit of Warm, the film turns into a shaggy dog story. Events seem increasingly haphazard. One moment a bear will turn up; another, murderous varmints wearing racoon hats will emerge from the bushes. This may reflect the inchoate and violent nature of life in the old west but it doesn’t make for smooth storytelling. Audiard is more interested in exploring the relationship between the brothers than in trying to stoke up suspense. The humour can seem incongruous when it is seen next to so much bloodshed and darkness. There is something perverse in the way the filmmakers try to make us identify with characters who are, in fact, homicidal killers.

It’s a measure of the four exceptional central performances (from Reilly, Phoenix, Gyllenhaal and Ahmed) that the film remains so engaging in spite of its narrative digressions and moments of very bleak violence. Audiard serves up just what audiences would expect in a tale from the wild frontier – wagon trains, rugged landscapes, galloping horses, decadent saloon bars and plenty of shootouts. Alongside the action, the director also shows us his characters’ inner lives. In doing so, he proves again that the western is far more durable and flexible as a genre than sceptics would have us believe.

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