Wild Bill, starring Jeff Bridges, is Walter Hill’s best film in years. It’s a movie about the self-destructive power of myth. By the end, Hill makes that self-destruction seem like the archetypal American story.

The movie itself is a lot of deadwood in the competitive holiday season.

The movie tries for poetry and elegy in its closing scenes, and we can see where it's headed, although it doesn't get there.

Jeff Bridges exquisitely captures this roaming, morose existence, this juxtaposition between the stature of an icon and the elegiac crawl towards death that we follow him on.