It's all Clint Eastwood's fault. 1992 Unforgiven He reinvented and rebooted the Western, a genre that had long fallen into cliché. Unforgiven He took tired clichés and turned them on their head, showing the shades of gray we didn't see in our matinee movies of good guys in white hats and bad guys in black hats. And filmmakers have followed suit ever since, with Western-style films that tell much more nuanced stories with much more complex characters and often much more violence, too.
These three films use the western genre, are all on Netflix and have 90% or higher on Rotten Tomatoes, but they tell very different stories. Bone axe shares part of its DNA with From dusk till dawn in its gruesome and exaggerated violence, while The oven takes the familiar trope of gold-driven greed, transplants it to the Australian outback and uses it to shed light on Australian history. And while Jane Campion The power of the dog It takes place under widescreen skies, the story it tells is much smaller and considerably more claustrophobic.
They could all be among the best movies on Netflix, so see which one you like best to watch this weekend.
Bone axe
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“Bone axe “It plunges headlong into violence with absolute courage and graphic indifference,” says Every Movie Has A Lesson, and that's probably an understatement: this is an exceptionally violent film that is definitely not for the faint of heart. As Ireland's The Herald newspaper put it: “For about 100 minutes, Bone axe “It plays out like a smart, genuinely enjoyable Western… and then the movie gets really unpleasant.”
The film follows a small-town sheriff (Kurt Russell) who leads a rescue mission to capture three people who have been kidnapped by a cannibalistic clan. The mission takes them into hostile territory, and things get complicated. Very complicated. But, as Empire explains, despite scenes that include “a spectacularly gruesome cannibal dismemberment,” the film is “as much a comedy as it is a western horror film… Its influences range all over the place, with stretches reminiscent of the Coen brothers, punctuated by echoes of Rob Zombie.”
The power of the dog
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Adapted from the cult novel by Thomas Savage, The power of the dog The film is set on a ranch in 1925 and, according to Empire, “meditates on the same romantic taboos, repression and visceral expressions of desire” as director Jane Campion's much-loved film. The pianoIt focuses on three key characters – Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), his brother's new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and Rose's son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – and tells their story slowly as the “worn guitar and sad strings” of Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood provide the sparse soundtrack.
“What seems like it could become a love story turns out to be a tale of revenge,” says The New Yorker, adding that while the film is “intensely beautiful” and “particularly stunning,” it is also terrifying and very intense. According to Columbus Alive, the film “doesn’t just have one of the best performances of the year; it has four of them,” and Salon wholeheartedly agrees: it is “a demanding drama about masculinity, toxic and otherwise… The strong performances and striking visual style make this a powerful piece of filmmaking.”
The oven
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The story may sound familiar (greed for gold leads to madness and violence), but The oven The film tells it well; according to The Australian it is “beautiful, even powerful, but quite bleak.” Director Roderick MacKay’s debut film is an Australian western set in the late 19th century with an impressively diverse cast and an interesting take on a well-worn story.
According to The Guardian, it has echoes of the classic The treasure of the Sierra Madreand critics agree that the film features a superb central performance from David Wenham and Ahmed Malek as Mal and Hanif, the duo at the center of this “road without roads” movie.
