Incisive yet supple, wrenching yet deeply pleasurable, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada easily ranks among the year's best pictures.

Making an altogether impressive big-screen directing debut, Jones exudes quiet control over this full-bodied Western, taking pleasure in his measured pacing, mixing somber authority with flashes of surrealist wit and luxuriating in the magnificent, vanishing vistas of his home state.

Three Burials is beautiful, authentic and brutally observant of human nature. With real Tex-Mex backdrops instead of the usual Monument Valley vistas and characters too complex to withstand simple white-hat/black-hat reductionism, Three Burials is a visionary portrait of the New West. This is the terrain of Eastwood and Peckinpah, saddled with the concerns of 21st-century life.

In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged.

Tommy Lee Jones steps behind the camera to direct himself in the most impressive directorial debut the American cinema has seen in some time, a contemporary western both rough and poetic, laconic and passionate.

All this edginess, combined with the grandeur and sweep of a classic western, demonstrates that Jones clearly knows how to tell a story -- and how to confound us at the same time.

Wily, sad, funny, and full of life.

Grizzled Texan Tommy Lee Jones has made an exceptionally moving, surprisingly funny, often beautiful film, packed with unforgettable moments and note-perfect performances.

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

Outstandingly realized on all levels.

Don't let the near-impossible-to-remember title keep you away from this singular and slightly surreal Tommy Lee Jones scorcher.

Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.

Jones' film actually takes you somewhere you haven't visited in a million other movies. It has a wonderful sense of place, and space, and carries the bite and tang of a good short story.

Sam Peckinpah lives! The rampaging spirit of the late filmmaker, known as Bloody Sam for films such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," is all over this blistering modern Western from first-time director Tommy Lee Jones.