The 12 Best Westerns Of The 21st Century

Clint Eastwood's mournful 1992 Western "Unforgiven" is a tale of aging gunfighters whose violent heyday is already becoming the stuff of myth and legend. The Oscar-winning film served as not just Eastwood's personal farewell to the genre that made him famous, but a fitting end to a hundred years of pop entertainment. The Western was one of Hollywood's earliest genres, and for most of the 20th century, tales of cowboys, outlaws, and pioneers were the backbone of the film industry, powering everything from prestige pictures like "How the West Was Won" to schlock like "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter." By the early 1990s, however, the Western had largely disappeared from the cinematic landscape. Beyond a handful of oaters spurred on by the success of "Unforgiven," it really did seem like the Western's day was finally done.

But now, in the third decade of the 21st century, it's clear that the genre never really left us. The last 20-something years have seen dozens of excellent Westerns, from quirky exercises like "Slow West" and "The Sisters Brothers" to revisionist spectacles like "The Harder They Fall." On television, "Yellowstone" and its spin-offs are some of the most popular shows of the day, while David Milch's "Deadwood," arguably the greatest Western of the 21st century, misses this list on a technicality (it's a TV series, not a film). Even Eastwood got back on the horse for 2021's "Cry Macho." Despite its conservative reputation, the Western has always been deeply ambivalent about traditional notions of masculinity, race, sex, violence, and the American experiment, and latter-day releases are no different. Let's take a look at 12 of the best Western films of the 21st century.

A grizzled Texas sheriff (Kurt Russell) leads an unsteady posse into hostile territory in search of his kidnapped deputy (Evan Jonigkeit) and the daughter (Lili Simmons) of the town doctor (Patrick Wilson). It's a stock Western premise, not a million miles removed from something like John Ford's "The Searchers," but S. Craig Zahler's 2015 debut feature "Bone Tomahawk" offers up a gruesome, horror-infused twist: The kidnappers are not outlaws or Comanche raiders, but a mute tribe of inbred, cave-dwelling cannibals referred to by one character as "troglodytes." These warriors may be brutal, but the journey to find them is just as dangerous, filled with infection, bullets, and the unforgiving harshness of nature.

Zahler's slow-burn genre hybrid is at times charmingly low-budget, with off-the-rack costumes and a Western town set that looks more like a theme park than an actual turn-of-the-century settlement. But if Zahler's scrimped on some elements, he knew where to make his money count, assembling an impressive and eclectic cast with one-scene cameos by David Arquette, Fred Melamed, Zahn McClarnon, Sean Young, and B-movie legends Sid Haig and James Tolkan. Zahler fills his desolate landscape and the lengthy running time with clever, just-this-side-of-purple dialogue; Jenkins, as an old codger who can't keep his mouth shut, becomes something of an unofficial narrator. And the film's brutal violence is just as impressively staged as the script's florid speeches, pushing past Zahler's dicey premise (an indigenous tribe of literal "savages") with the courage of its convictions.

In 1997 Annie Proulx wrote the short story "Brokeback Mountain" for The New Yorker, about a pair of young cowboys in 1960s Wyoming who fall in love while herding sheep together on the eponymous mountain. The men, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, insist that neither is gay, but the events of that fateful summer reverberate through the rest of their lives. Ennis descends into alcoholism and depression, alienating him from his wife and daughter, while Jack marries rich and spends his idle time indulging in increasingly reckless behavior to try to recapture the passion he felt with Ennis. Spanning two decades, the story ends in inevitable tragedy for two men who could not live with each other but couldn't live without.

Ang Lee's sensitive 2005 adaptation was scripted by Diana Ossana and "Lonesome Dove" novelist Larry McMurtry, who make only minimal changes from the short story. The plot closely follows Proulx's spare, effortlessly poetic prose, and much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from the page; McMurtry and Ossana won an Oscar for their efforts. Stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger were nominated for their performances as Jack and Ennis, along with Michelle Williams (Ledger's real-life partner at the time) as Ennis' long-suffering wife. The film became a culture war flashpoint, arriving amidst the nationwide battle for same-sex marriage, but neither it nor Proulx's original story is a political tract. The tragedy of Jack and Ennis comes not just from a culture of bigotry and hatred, but from the cowboy stoicism that young men are expected, if not demanded, to perform. As Ennis says, "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."

Somewhere between "The Act of Killing" and "Waiting for Guffman" sits "Bisbee '17," the odd, damning 2018 documentary from director Robert Greene. In 1917, around 1,300 copper mine workers in Bisbee, Arizona — most of whom were immigrants — went on strike. In response, a posse of 2,000 men rounded up the strikers, loaded them at gunpoint into cattle cars, and shipped them 200 miles into the New Mexico desert to fend for themselves. Known as the Bisbee Deportation, the event is a dark chapter in the history of the labor movement and of Bisbee itself, where descendants of the strikers and of the posse still live. In 2017, the town chose to honor the centennial of the deportation by organizing a massive reenactment.

Like Greene's other films, "Bisbee '17" is a tricky hall-of-mirrors act. We listen to the townspeople talk about the deportation in candid moments and staged interviews, but Greene also films scenes of the reenactment as though it were a fictional film. Young actor Fernando Serrano, playing a striking worker, seems to be having a political awakening in real-time, as his role in the pageant forces him to confront how his mother was deported when he was a boy. Others involved, on the other hand, seem to be oblivious to any modern considerations of the Bisbee Deportation, content to play cowboy dress-up. The climactic reenactment, with a crowd of armed white men marching through the streets, just as their forefathers had a century before, is a harrowing vision of how close the past remains to the present.

Nearly a decade after the grim march of "Meek's Cutoff," Kelly Reichardt returned to days gone by with the gentle "First Cow." Beginning with the modern-day discovery of two skeletons buried side by side, the film takes us all the way back to the 1820s, when the Oregon territory was at the mercy of competing American, Russian, and British interests. Cookie (John Magaro), a sensitive Boston baker working for loutish fur trappers, makes fast friends with King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant on the run for murder. When the local settlement receives its first milking cow, owned by the local British bigwig (Toby Jones), Cookie and Lu take to milking the cow under the cover of night and selling the cakes and biscuits they make with it each day. Their oily cakes become a sensation, but no crime, even a relatively innocent one like milking another man's cow, can go undiscovered forever.

Where "Meek's Cutoff" emphasizes the desolate, alien experience of the Oregon Trail, "First Cow" is all about how little distance there is between then and now. The film transitions from the modern day to two centuries prior in a single cut, finding Cookie in the exact same lush forest as the 21st-century hiker (Alia Shawkat) who finds his remains. For Reichardt, there is no difference between the present and the past; the rich and powerful still hoard their wealth, immigrants are still looked on as outsiders, and the only way to win a rigged game is to cheat.

With the possible exception of the villain of the next film, there is no nastier piece of work on this list than Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), the oil man in Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood." He starts the film in a hole in the desert, nearly killing himself for a cup of gold dust. A few years after that, he is well-dressed and respectable, using the orphaned son (Dillon Freasier and Russell Harvard) of one of his workers as a prop, selling himself as a family man to the rubes whose underground wealth he covets. Daniel's brutish personality requires that all in his orbit bow to his will, but he meets his match in Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a baby-faced preacher with his own dreams of unlimited wealth and influence.

Based loosely on Upton Sinclair's 1926 novel "Oil!," Anderson's script distills the political theories of its source material into a portrait of a singular, monstrous man. Day-Lewis' powerhouse performance has been rightly lauded over the years for its grandiose moments, as when he subjects himself to a humiliating testimony in front of Eli's congregation, or his famous explanation of the concept of drainage ("I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"). But he is more terrifying in the quiet moments; when speaking to his long-lost brother, the word "people" comes out of his mouth like a predator fantasizing about his prey. Was Daniel Plainview born with a bottomless need for wealth and power, or was he simply a man who met his moment more ruthlessly than most? For those people he hurt, swindled, abandoned, and killed, what difference does it make?

The question of why anyone would want to be a cowboy these days, much less need to be one, is at the heart of Chloé Zhao's breakthrough feature, 2017's "The Rider." Enlisting a cast of non-professional actors from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the film tells the story of Brady Blackburn (real-life horse trainer Brady Jandreau), a Lakota rodeo rider recovering from a terrible accident. Living back on the reservation with his father and sister (played by Jandreau's real-life family), Brady is adrift until he begins to work with Apollo, an unbroken horse who needs as much work as Brady himself does. Before long, he plans his return to the rodeo circuit, but his injuries cannot be wished or dreamed away; his doctor warns that another ride could kill him.

The film draws heavily from Jandreau's own life, even including footage of a real accident he suffered on a horse in 2016. He and Zhao met years before on a different film, and she was quickly impressed with his expressiveness and ability to coax feelings out of his horses. While technically a work of fiction, the film's most transcendent moments come when Zhao aims her camera at Brady as he trains horses and trains others to ride rough stock as he once did. By the film's cathartic ending, the question is not why anyone would want to be a cowboy, but why anyone would ever want to be anything else.