A western film doesn't have to mean wild-eyed cowboys, swinging saloon doors and dramatic shootouts in a one-horse town, though should that be what you're after there's plenty of that on offer here too. Instead nowadays we see films inspired by the sweeping vistas, operatic music and extreme violence of the genre but that don't necessarily take place in the Wild West.
Whether it's Tarantino's clever ode to spaghetti westerns in Inglourious Basterds, frosty frontiersman revenge story The Revenant or the classic shoot-'em-ups of the Coen brothers,
Westerns have a sense of adventure and drama to them that feels transporting and thrilling.
Go on a journey right now with one of these ten great westerns on Netflix.
True Grit
Ethan and Joel Coen's 2010 ode to the Wild West is one of the finest modern westerns, mixing shootouts and wry humour in a revisionist tale that features vast golden desert-scapes. Adapted from Charles Portis' 1968 novel of the same name, True Grit tells the story of feisty young girl Mattie Ross who hires the trigger-happy "Rooster" Cogburn (an excellent Jeff Bridges) to track down and avenge the outlaw named Tom Chaney who murdered her father.
Hostiles
There's no escaping the bloody violence of the American West in this gritty story from Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper. It features a brilliant turn from Christian Bale who plays an army captain tasked with escorting a Cheyenne war chief and his family from New Mexico to their tribal lands in rural Montana. On the way they meet a young woman who has faced untold violence, saying darkly, “Sometimes I envy the finality of death."
Mudbound
A piece of land in the Mississippi Delta ties two families together for better and worse. Though divided by race and class, both want better for their struggling families, a fact that forces them to work together on the shared farmland. After a man from each family goes off to war they return traumatised by combat and back to the same problems that war had freed them from. Though it is set around the second world war, director Dee Rees has said that she was trying to shoot the film like a western, and it does successfully capture the same expansive visuals and gloomy, gritty feel as the best of the genre.
The Revenant
The film that finally won Leo his Oscar tells the story of Hugh Glass, a fabled frontiersman who is injured in a bear attack and abandoned by his hunting crew. Alejandro González Iñárritu's (Birdman) snowbound story shows how he survives and wreaks revenge on his abandoners, in doing so telling stories about 1820s America, the price of life, the roots of capitalism and of killing nature for profit, fear, judgement and prejudice.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The Coen brothers' western anthology which started life as a film before being serialised, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a six-part collection of tales about the American frontier – the first days of European settlement on the Atlantic coast – with each episode focusing on a different storyline. In the titular instalment, the story of a "sharp-shooting songster" is explored, in 'Near Algodones', a wannabe bank robber gets his comeuppance and 'Meal Ticket' is a gothic tale about two weary travelling performers.
Godless
Jeff Bridges and Jack O'Connell play warring cowboys Frank Griffin, an outlaw terrorising the 1880s American West, and Roy Goode, his partner turned enemy, in this Emmy-winning Netflix series which is produced by Steven Soderbergh. Over seven episodes set in the frontier mining town of La Belle, New Mexico we are introduced to a host of characters, (including Michelle Dockery playing an aloof widow running a ranch) and witness all manner of gun-blazing massacres and train-wreck calamities.
The Killer
Titled O Matador in its native language, this B-western was the first Brazilian Netflix original to be released by the streaming platform. It tells the story of an assassin who turns against the tyrannical landowner of the region and leaves a trail of bodies in his wake. As a B-movie it's filled with nefarious characters such as killers, shady bosses and hookers. It also features the kind of brutal violence that will turn your stomach, including a scene where a soldier's tongue is cut off.
Robert Redford's The American West
Deciphering fact from fiction, this 8-part docudrama explores the Wild West, from 1865 to 1890 in the United States, and the stories behind the period's legendary characters. Produced by Robert Redford, the episodes focus on mythic characters including Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Gen. George Custer, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, with appearances from Tom Selleck, Kiefer Sutherland, Burt Reynolds and Redford himself.
Black '47
An Irish western set during the great famine, this 2018 period drama follows an Irish Ranger who has been fighting for the British Army abroad as he abandons his post in order to be reunited with his family. Taking its title from the devastating year of the famine which is referred to as "Black '47", it turns a harrowing piece of history into a blazing revenge story.
Inglourious Basterds
"Inglourious Basterds is truly spaghetti western, just set in Nazi-occupied France," once said director Quentin Tarantino of his Academy Award-winning 2009 film. Setting up the fixation with spaghetti westerns which began in Kill Bill and which the director went on to explore in Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Inglorious Bastards features horrifying shoot-outs, oddball villains and a tale of revenge, all against a soundtrack filled with the classic spaghetti western music of Ennio Morricone.
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