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Hostiles
"Hostiles" (2017), starring Christian Bale, follows a U.S. Army captain ordered to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief and his family back to their tribal lands in the late 19th century, structured as a journey narrative that directly confronts America's violent frontier history rather than romanticizing it. Its unflinching depiction of frontier-era violence against both Native Americans and white settlers avoided the more simplistically heroic framing common to earlier Hollywood westerns, presenting a morally complex reckoning with the historical brutality underlying America's westward expansion. The film's slow-burning, character-driven approach, focused on the gradual, reluctant mutual respect developing between Bale's initially hardened captain and the Cheyenne family he's escorting, reflected the broader neo-western genre's tendency toward more psychologically complex character studies than classic-era western filmmaking typically attempted. Its combination of its unflinching historical reckoning and its psychologically complex central relationship has made "Hostiles" one of the more critically serious and morally ambitious neo-western films of its era.
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The Rider
"The Rider" (2017), directed by Chloé Zhao, follows a young Lakota rodeo rider and horse trainer forced to reckon with his identity after a near-fatal head injury ends his competitive riding career, filmed on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation using non-professional actors playing versions of themselves. Its docufiction approach, casting real rodeo rider Brady Jandreau as a fictionalized version of his own actual life story following his real career-ending injury, gave the film an unusually direct, lived-in authenticity relative to more conventionally scripted and cast neo-western dramas. The film's quiet, contemplative visual style, capturing the Great Plains landscape and horse-training sequences with a naturalistic intimacy, established the same directorial sensibility Zhao would later bring to her Academy Award-winning "Nomadland" a few years afterward. Its combination of its genuinely lived-in docufiction authenticity and Zhao's naturalistic directorial style has made "The Rider" one of the most critically acclaimed and quietly powerful neo-western films of the 2010s.
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