6 Best Neo-Westerns Every Filmmaker Needs to Study

We've been covering a lot of Westerns on the website, and for good reason. They often are emblematic of the America in which they were made. They are these mini history lessons in the social mores and ideologies of their times. But we also live at a time when very few Westerns are being made.

Still, crafty filmmakers have found a way to have their cake and eat it, too. They've created a new genre called Neo-Westerns, which are modern movies not set in the Old West but that have many of the tropes and qualities we've come to expect from westerns.

They are great reflections of them, of modern America, but also may be mashed up with another genre or take a new form in order to tell a western story.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from those movies.

Let's dive in.

1. No Country for Old Men (2007)

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• Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
• Writer: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy)
• Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald, Woody Harrelson

The Coen brothers crafted the ultimate post-modern Western by taking away the one thing every Western seemed to find beforehand...justice. This is a movie about an unfair world, where lawmen don't get the bad guy; he just gets away, and we have to live with the consequences of chasing money, even though our hero is good.

It takes on the sins of Vietnam, of unchecked capitalism, and of healthcare and other American ideals and places them in the narrative seamlessly. There is virtually no musical score; we just have the real world caving in on us, and Roger Deakins' brilliant cinematography making the landscape a character.

2. Hell or High Water (2016)

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• Director: David Mackenzie
• Writer: Taylor Sheridan
• Cast: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham

Look, Taylor Sheridan is going to dominate this list because, truth be told, he dominates this space. And I think this might be the best thing he's ever written.

The story follows two brothers robbing branches of the very bank that is threatening to foreclose on their family ranch, while a pair of Texas Rangers track them down.

That seems like a generic Western idea, but this is way more about the class system and the unfair series of events that allowed these banks to get bailed out but not the people who used them. It takes on that financial crisis in a very American way, with guns.

Those guns show the cost of this journey, with innocent people dying along the path, but it's all in pursuit of something even more American... oil, which has been found on the brothers' land and which we watch pump at the end, wondering when the luck will run out.

3. Sicario (2015)

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• Director: Denis Villeneuve
• Writer: Taylor Sheridan
• Cast: Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Jon Bernthal

Another Sheridan movie, this one takes on the cartels and drug raids in ways he hasn't seen, with a guise of a bad guy in a cartel leader, who winds up being a stand-in for the CIA and their mercenaries, who we see are also responsible for the violence at the borders.

Sicario expands the borderland mythology of the Western by actually confronting how complicated it is and subverting the trope of the "white hat" lawman bringing order to chaos. Here, the deeper we get, the more we see chaos. And the more we see, there are no white hats.

Roger Deakins reframes the desert as a tactical war zone instead of a vista. When we get wide shots of a setting sun, they're against the backdrop of bullets flying through the air and endless amounts of people dying.

4. Logan (2017)

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• Director: James Mangold
• Writer: Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
• Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook

One of the best comic book movies ever made, this borrows a ton from George Stevens’ 1953 classic Western Shane (which the characters literally watch in a hotel room).

Logan takes an iconic, larger-than-life hero and forces him to confront his own obsolescence in a world that no longer has room for him and an America we don't really recognize as free for everyone.

I love how it focuses on the characters and their battle, not just with an external force come to call, but with their own place in this new frontier.

5. Wind River (2017)

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• Director: Taylor Sheridan
• Writer: Taylor Sheridan
• Cast: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Gil Birmingham, Graham Greene

Most Westerns want the sun shining down on the hot desert. But this movie is all coldness, which absolutely dials into the themes. It opens on a woman running barefoot and dying, and then transports us to a reservation in Wyoming where it feels like the warmth has been left a long time ago. These are our sins, laid bare.

The film shines a glaring light on the real-world displacement and systemic neglect experienced by Indigenous communities. It does so by also not giving us any answers; this is the America we also live in, and one with no simple fixes.

6. Yellowstone (2018–Present)

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• Creator/Director: Taylor Sheridan, John Linson
• Writer: Taylor Sheridan, Eric Beck
• Cast: Kevin Costner, Luke Grimes, Kelly Reilly, Wes Bentley, Cole Hauser

I had to bring in one of the most popular TV shows of all time, which took a whole bunch of people to the wild west for the first time. And brought a lot of new flair into the western genre.

The series follows the Dutton family, owners of the largest contiguous ranch in the United States. They have to resort to the old ways and some new ones, like lawyers, to defend their land from land developers, an Indian reservation, and America's first National Park.

It's the destruction of a family, and of the myth of the Wild West during what people would call a more civil time, that gradually becomes less and less civil as they return to the violent past and have to do things with a gun.

Summing It All Up

These Neo Westerns show that you can take the tropes and ideas from classical Westerns and flip them on their heads to create something personal and exciting.

They have those Americana elements and a lot to say about the state of things today. What are some more titles we should add to this list?

Let me know what you think in the comments.