The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

“A poetic masterpiece... This definitive treatment of the legendary event of the title pivots on a hero-worship and paranoia that are entirely appropriate to our present era.” Jim Kitses, Sight & Sound, December 2007 Boldly giving away the outcome in the title, writer-director Andrew Dominik’s western concentrates instead on poetic period recreation and intense psychology in a series of haunting episodes framed by narration from Ron Hansen’s source novel. Brad Pitt reinvents the famous outlaw as a paranoid psychopath, but it’s the Oscar-nominated Casey Affleck who dominates with his simultaneously creepy and hearbreaking performance as Bob Ford, the bright-eyed young wannabe with “an appetite for greater things” whose hero worship turns homicidal. The oil-lamp glow of Roger Deakins’s cinematography and the ethereal piano-and-viola score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis enhance a brooding atmosphere of fatalism, offset by scenes of salty male banter and dreamlike set pieces such as the night-time train robbery in a forest. Other screen incarnations of the outlaw include Tyrone Power in Jesse James (1939), Robert Duvall in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) and Colin Farrell in American Outlaws (2001).