We’re celebrating the variety and diversity of this year’s movie and TV westerns.
So what is it a western anyway?
Throughout 2024, we’ve seen in movie theaters and on TV screens several examples of traditional westerns, modern-day westerns, so-called “neo-westerns,” western-themed documentaries, and on and on. Not that we’re complaining, mind you. Better feast than famine, right? But it does present a challenge to anyone tasked with compiling a list such as this one.
We did our best to meet that challenge by casting as wide a net as possible.
Accidental Texan
Months before Billy Bob Thornton unleashed his profanely funny Tommy Norris in Landman, Thomas Haden Church winningly portrayed an indie oil man who proudly proclaims “I punch holes in the earth like a badass,” despite a demoralizing string of drilling dry holes, in this unabashedly old-fashioned comedy-drama. Backed by co-stars Rudy Pankow, Carrie-Anne Moss and Bruce Dern, Church balances folksy humor with the wisdom and sadness that comes from years of chasing dreams that only sporadically come to fruition, and eloquently expresses a well-nigh inexhaustible drive that stops just short of desperation.
The Dead Don’t Hurt
Viggo Mortensen impressed and engrossed while doing triple duty as director, writer and star of this boldly stylized time-tripping drama. It’s all about a Danish carpenter named Holger Olsen (Mortensen) who meets a French-Canadian woman named Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) in San Francisco, and romances her into living with him in a remote Nevada town. They are happy together — until he enlists to fight in the Civil War. While he’s away, she has to fend for herself while dealing with some of the less pleasant men in the area. The nonlinear narrative is compelling, and the performances are outstanding.
Elkhorn
This splendidly entertaining INSP series effectively dramatizes (and romanticizes) Theodore Roosevelt’s early career as a cattle rancher in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory. Lead player Mason Beals strikes the perfect balance of greenhorn vulnerability and tenacious determination as he confronts such daunting challenges as disarming a barroom bully, facing down hired guns, tracking down horse thieves, and killing a grizzly bear. We can’t wait to see more of his as Young Teddy in Season 2 in 2025.
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter One
Kevin Costner was underrated by critics and under- supported by audiences when he gave us what he (and we) hope is only the first installment of his planned four-part epic western. Fortunately, his lavishly produced and sensationally sweeping drama is being rediscovered by viewers on streaming platforms and home video, greatly increasing the odds that his already-completed Chapter Two will enjoy a warmer reception when it’s released (again, he and we hope) in 2025.
Landman
The latest addition to the Taylor Sheridan Universe is a highly addictive melodrama about risk-taking oilfield workers and high-rolling oil industry executives in the wild and wooly realm of West Texas. Sometimes raucously funny, sometimes joltingly intense, Landman is at its best when it focuses on the cagey wheeler-dealing and blunt-spoken orneriness of its title character, oil company crisis manager Tommy Norris, played to unfiltered perfection by Billy Bob Thornton.
Outer Range
The second season of this trippy western thriller, best described as an amalgamation of Twin Peaks and Yellowstone, was even spookier than the first — which was pretty dadgum spooky already — with Josh Brolin first among equals in an excellent ensemble cast as Royal Abbott, a rancher who discovers, while fighting for his land and family, an unfathomable mystery at the edge of Wyoming’s wilderness.
Outlaw Posse
Writer-director Mario Van Peebles neatly balanced straight-shooting action-action and wink-wink tongue-in-cheekiness in this improbably enjoyable movie, which plays like a seriocomic homage to both the over-the-top Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and the ‘70s “blaxploitation” oaters that once provided steady employment for the likes of Fred Williamson and Jim Brown.
Ride
C. Thomas Howell, an actor with quite a bit of real-life rodeo experience to his credit, and Yellowstone mainstay Forrie J. Smith, who turned to acting after a lengthy career as roper, wrangler and all-around cowboy, generously contributed to the authenticity of Ride, director/co-writer/co-star Jake Allyn’s irresistibly involving indie drama about a rodeo family that turns to crime to finance their young daughter’s cancer treatments.
Territory
Longmire star and C&I reader favorite Robert Taylor looms large in this exceptionally fine six-episode Netflix series about power struggles and familial squabbles in the unforgiving Australian Outback. Michael Dorman (Joe Pickett) and Anna Torv (The Last of Us) also shine in director Greg McLean’s drama about the battle for control of Marianne Station, a cattle rancher larger than the Ponderosa and Yellowstone Ranch put together.
Yellowstone
What more can we say? Some of us might have wanted a different conclusion, and many of us sorely missed the presence of Kevin Costner’s John Dutton. But few can argue that the final season of Taylor Sheridan’s phenomenally popular neo-western — or to be more specific, Season 5B — remained Must-See TV to the very end. We’ve been promised a spin-off series featuring Cole Hauser and Beth Dutton (pictured below). But that show has a tough act to follow.
