Most critics like Pale Rider. The praise gathers around Eastwood himself, as director and as the mysterious Preacher: a restrained, laconic style that plays the old story straight, with a dry wit underneath. Nearly every review notes the debt to Shane and does not hold it against the film. The photography of the landscape is singled out repeatedly, as is the ecological argument that updates the familiar quarrel between poor settlers and corrupt interests.
The reservations are mostly mild. Several reviews find the mythmaking a little self-conscious, and the religious symbolism is judged heavy-handed by more than one. Eye for Film calls it one of Eastwood’s weaker westerns, with jarring slapstick, though it admires Sydney Penny and the final shootout. The one dissent is The New Yorker, which sees an over-deliberate art western lacking Eastwood’s usual tension and finds the climactic gunfight a failure. Paste, writing recently, reads it as a shift in Eastwood’s thinking about violence.