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It’s All Clint Eastwood’s Fault. 1992’s Unforgiven has reinvented and breathed new life into the western, a genre that had long fallen into cliché. Unforgiven took the old clichés and turned them on their head, showing the shades of gray that 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 telling much more nuanced stories with much more complex characters and often much more violence.
These three films are all Westerns, are all on Netflix, and all have audience ratings over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, but they tell very different stories. Bot Tomahawk shares some of its DNA with From dusk to dawn in its gruesome, exaggerated violence, while The oven takes the familiar trope of gold-driven greed, transplants it to the Outback and uses it to shed light on Australian history. And while Jane Campion’s The power of the dog Set under a vast starry sky, the story being told is much smaller and a lot more claustrophobic.
They’re all among the best Netflix movies, so see which one you’re most excited to watch over the weekend.
Bot Tomahawk
“Bot Tomahawk “goes head-on to violence with absolute courage and graphic contempt,” says Every movie has a lessonand that’s probably an understatement: this is an exceptionally violent film that is definitely not for the faint of heart. Like Ireland’s The Herald say it this way: “For about 100 minutes, Bot Tomahawk “It’s a clever and genuinely entertaining western… but then the film takes a turn for the worse.”
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 messy. Very messy. But when Empire explains that despite scenes featuring “one spectacularly gruesome mutilation of a cannibal,” the film is “as much a comedy as it is a cowboy horror film… The influences are everywhere, with passages reminiscent of the Coen brothers interspersed with echoes of Rob Zombie.”
The power of the dog
Inspired by Thomas Savage’s cult novel, The power of the dog takes place on a ranch in 1925 and according to Empire“muses on the same romantic taboos, repression and visceral expressions of desire” as director Jane Campion’s beloved film The PianoThe film revolves around three main characters: Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), his brother’s new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and Rose’s son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The story is told slowly, while the “scratched guitar and mournful strings” of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood provide the sparse soundtrack.
“What looks like a love story turns out to be a revenge story,” The New Yorker says, adding that while the film is “intensely beautiful” and “above all breathtaking,” it is also terrifying and very intense. According to Columbus lives the film “not only has one of the best performances of the year; it has four,” with Salon totally agree: it’s “a demanding drama about masculinity, toxic and otherwise…. The strong performances and striking visual style make this a powerful piece of filmmaking.”
The oven
The story may sound familiar – gold-related greed leads to madness and violence – but The oven tells it very well; according to The Australian it’s “beautiful, even powerful, but rather 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 familiar story.
According to The guard it has echoes of the classical The Treasure of the Sierra Madreand critics agree that the film features a terrific central performance from David Wenham and Ahmed Malek as Mal and Hanif, the duo at the heart of this “roadless road movie.”
