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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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Hell or High Water
"Hell or High Water" (2016) follows two brothers robbing branches of the same bank chain across rural West Texas to save their family ranch from foreclosure, pursued by a Texas Ranger nearing retirement, transplanting classic western genre conventions into a specifically contemporary economic setting. Its portrayal of small-town West Texas communities devastated by the 2008 financial crisis and predatory bank lending practices gave the film a pointed social commentary dimension, using the traditional western's outlaw-versus-lawman structure to comment directly on modern economic inequality. Jeff Bridges's performance as the aging Texas Ranger, alongside Chris Pine and Ben Foster as the brother bank robbers, earned widespread critical acclaim and multiple Academy Award nominations, including for Bridges's supporting performance and the film's original screenplay. Its combination of its pointed contemporary economic commentary and its classic western genre structure has made "Hell or High Water" one of the most critically acclaimed neo-western films of the 2010s.
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