The House Next Door

On paper, director Walter Hill's latest work, "Broken Trail," sounds like a return to familiar territory: a leisurely, two-part AMC cable movie about a couple of cowpokes (Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church) escorting a wagonload of Chinese prostitutes across immense and often forbidding vistas, driving horses and surviving gunfights while getting to know, trust and help one another.

But in the hands of Hill, writer and co-producer Alan Geffrion, and the formidable Duvall (who's credited as an executive producer), this variation on an oft-told tale acquires a sneaky mythic heft. It's so relaxed, almost meditative -- with so much attention paid to the rituals of trail life and the color and texture of the land and sky -- that you don't so much watch it as get lost inside it.

To read the rest of the Star-Ledger review, click here.