Best Picture and Best Director Awards from both the Los Angeles and the New York Film Critics’ Associations, seven Golden Globe nominations, and the highest per-screen box office grosses of the year greeted Brokeback Mountain’s five-screen, three city U.S. debut last Friday.  The extremely limited release of Ang Lee’s critically-acclaimed motion picture adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 New Yorker short story expands slightly today (December 16). The picture enters wider U.S. release next month, with its broadest distribution scheduled shrewdly for February, after most of the major award nominations have been announced, and/or handed out.

But while Focus Features may be rolling out Brokeback Mountain slowly, reviewers have been quick to go for Brokeback big time.      

Exactly what have the opinion-makers been saying and writing?

Cinemablend.com film critic Joshua Tyler launched his review with two provocative questions: “Does being grossed out by gay men having sex make me a homophobe?  Does it make me a bad person?" (My answer: our emotional reaction more clearly reflects our deepest beliefs than does our intellectual response. So yes, if you’re emotionally “grossed out” by gay sex, then a problem exists. But that doesn't necessarily make you a bad person.)

But cinemablend’s review notwithstanding, most critics, major and minor, have swooned over Brokeback Mountain.

Rolling Stone’s highly respected Peter Travers wrote, “Ang Lee’s unmissable and unforgettable Brokeback Mountain hits you like a shot in the heart. It’s a landmark film and a triumph…”  Travers is, apparently, available for dancing in the street.

Newsweek’s Sean Smith may want to rumba alongside him down Reviewer Road, describing the film as “a near-perfect adaptation of Proulx’s work. Brokeback feels like a landmark film. No American film before has portrayed love between two men as something this pure and sacred.”

Over at Time, America’s other major news weekly, Richard Schickel was not quite as impressed. He concludes: “For all its brave beginnings and real achievements – its assault on Western mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual energy in an unexpected locale – Brokeback Mountain finally fails to fully engage our emotions.”

The New York Times dubbed Brokeback “moving and majestic…a landmark.”  Stephen Holden’s ecstatic review anointed Heath Ledger’s work:  “It’s a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn….Brokeback Mountain is about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.”

The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain’s original publisher, saw it this way, “This slow and stoic movie hailed as a gay Western feels neither gay nor especially Western: “It is a story of love under siege.”

As expected, the gay press has been singing, dancing, and screaming Brokeback’s praise from rooftops.  

The Advocate’s Alonso Duralde heralds its “haunting and practically perfect romance…Ledger is nothing short of revelatory. Gyllenhaal gets to play a lot of different notes, and he hits them all perfectly. Brokeback represents a new high-water mark for Hollywood’s handling of gay love stories.  Whether or not multiplex audiences can handle Ledger and Gyllenhaal kissing, cinematic history is nonetheless unfolding before us.”

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