Every one of the eight reviews is favourable, and the praise settles almost entirely on Robert Duvall. Critics describe his washed-up country singer as spare, unshowy and lived-in, a performance that works by holding back. Beyond him, the reviews credit Bruce Beresford’s restrained direction and Horton Foote’s script for revealing character through small details and silences, and several note the Texas locations and the attention paid to faces. Time Out goes furthest, treating the film as a source for later American independent cinema.
The spread is narrow. The one real reservation comes from The New Yorker, where Pauline Kael finds it slow to engage, with minimal dialogue and characters that stay blank for too long, before warming to its quiet relationships. Variety is more measured, describing it as old-fashioned in a good way and singling out Tess Harper and Allan Hubbard in support. Newer reviews, from The AV Club and Collider, are as fond as the ones from 1983.