Netflix fans 'should watch' 6 powerful Western films that are streaming now
There's nothing quite like putting on a brilliant film when you've got some spare time. While many adore thrillers or romantic tales, it's often enjoyable to mix things up a bit. Recently, viewers have been going mad for Western series such as Yellowstone, alongside 1923 featuring Helen Mirren, and Ransom Canyon remained in the top 10 for four weeks earlier this year.
Additionally, there's a wealth of Western films available on Netflix that you might not be aware of, offering loads of action. Well-known film recommendation account, The House of Movies on TikTok, which garners millions of views for its content, has revealed six movies that deserve a spot on your western viewing list.
1. Sweet Girl
This gripping film, packed with action and adventure, features Jason Momoa and Isabela Merced. Netflix's synopsis states: "He taught his daughter the best way to win an unfair fight is to fight harder. To get justice for all they've lost, these two must fight together."
The movie runs for just under two hours and was released in 2021. It holds a 3.7 rating out of 5 on Google reviews. Viewers have described it as "exhilarating and deeply moving", whilst also praising its "remarkable plot".
2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
This 2018 production, which runs for 2 hours and 13 minutes, secured three Oscar nominations and claimed Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival. Crafted by the Coen brothers, the film holds an 89% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and features an impressive ensemble cast, including Liam Neeson, James Franco, and Tim Blake Nelson.
The film showcases 19th-century post-Civil War America during the settling of the Old West. It weaves together the stories of six distinct characters - a singing gunslinger, a bank robber, a travelling impresario, an elderly prospector, a twisted pair of bounty hunters, and a wagon train.
3. The Power of the Dog
This psychological drama, released in 2021, is set in 1925. Netflix describes the film as follows: "Amid the wild beauty of the West, a rancher driven to dominate beast and brethren brutally undermines his brother's new bride and her teen son."
If you're a fan of dark, thought-provoking and subtle themes, this film could be just your cup of tea. Directed by Jane Campion, it's based on Thomas Savage's 1967 novel and boasts a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
4. Concrete Cowboy
Produced in 2020, this American drama film, based on the novel Ghetto Cowboy, has earned an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It features Luther star Idris Elba and Stranger Things' Caleb McLaughlin.
Netflix says: "Sent to live with his estranged father for the summer, a rebellious teen finds kinship in a tight-knit Philadelphia community of Black cowboys."
Google reviews describe the film as a "great eye opener", as well as being "touching and powerful".
5. The Ridiculous 6
This Netflix original tells the tale of Tommy 'White Knife' Stockburn who embarks on a rescue mission across the West with his five brothers he never knew he had, after their outlaw dad is kidnapped.
Adam Sandler takes on the role of Tommy in this star-studded film, featuring Terry Crews, Rob Schneider, Luke Wilson, Jorge Garcia and Taylor Launtner. If you're after a blend of western themes with a dash of comedy and satire, then this 2015 flick is just the ticket.
One chuffed viewer took to Google reviews to declare it as "absolutely rib cracking hilarious", while another praised "the absurdity of it all is definitely a highlight".
6. The Killer
This gripping 2017 film, directed by David Fincher, carries an 18 rating and runs for just over 90 minutes. The plot of this Brazilian western is summarised as: "In lawless badlands, reclusive Cabeleira sets out to discover the fate of his gunman father and grows to be a feared assassin himself."
It has earned a solid 6/10 rating on IMDb. Google reviewers have hailed it as a "beautiful film" and a "masterpiece".
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Jason Momoa reveals the moment he feared he would DIE during 'brutal' surfing accident in Hawaii
Jason Momoa is opening up about a near-death incident that still haunts him to this day. The 46-year-old Aquaman star revealed on the latest episode of the Smartless podcast that he nearly drowned while on a surf outing off the coast of Maui, Hawaii, in 2007. 'I was doing this paddle, we went in at Jaws,' Momoa said, referring to the surf break located on the northern shore of Maui, which draws the world's top surfers to its enormous — and potentially deadly — waves. Momoa — who is currently dating the Andor actress Adria Arjona — explained to hosts Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes that his group of paddle boarders were taking a 13-mile route along the island's coast when his situation took a dire turn. 'You're kind of almost a mile offshore, and then my leash snapped. We're about seven miles into it and my leash snapped, and it's so windy on Maui,' he said. Momoa, who was at the time starring on Stargate: Atlantis, said he was 'trained pretty well' at the time, so he initially felt 'fine,' but things took a turn for the worse as waves began to batter him. 'I took quite a few on the head. They're pretty big, like 10-foot Hawaiian waves,' he shared. 'But I'm probably half a mile at that point offshore.' But as he began to tire from staying afloat in the chaotic sea, Momoa got to a point where he was 'stuck in this crazy spot,' which he thought may have been the outer ridge of a coral reef, which kept him out of sight of his friends. 'I was really on the outer reef and they couldn't see me,' he said. 'I had my paddle and I was waving it and they couldn't see me, and the waves were so big.' The actor — who was still two years away from his breakout turn on Game Of Thrones — began to panic as he thought about his three-month-old daughter Lola. Momoa shared his daughter, now 18, with his ex-wife Lisa Bonet, and the former couple later welcome their son Nakoa-Wolf, 16. 'I just lost it. I was like, "Oh s***,"' Moma admitted. Momoa said he began to just drift in the water as he feared that he had been left behind by the rest of his group. 'I was out there for a while, and I just couldn't see anyone coming to get me. I couldn't move anymore, and my arms and my legs gave up,' he recalled. 'My body stopped. Like I couldn't move my arms anymore, and I bubbled down. Then my toe hit the outer reef. 'I literally gave up, and I'm screaming inside,' Momoa said of his moment of despair. But he got the motivation to go on at the last possible moment when one of his friends spotted him and swam out toward him for support. 'I get back on the board and we start paddling,' he recalled, adding that it wasn't possible to just swim the shorter distance back to shore. 'He's like, "You got to go out," so we just keep paddling out.' Momoa and his friend still had seven more miles to go on the journey, even as the 'brutal' waves battered them the whole way. By that point, the Dune actor was bleeding profusely from cutting himself on the reef lurking just below the surface. 'My feet are covered in blood,' he recounted. 'And I'm just literally [with] my ancestors just paddling the rest of this way, head down and we get out.' Momoa's near-death experience was followed by an incredible career resurgence that he's still in the midst of today. He become one of the biggest stars on the planet after scoring a major role on Game Of Thrones as Khal Drogo, and he followed that part up with his role as Aquaman in multiple DC Comics films. Momoa also tried his hand at playing in the Fast And Furious sequel Fast X and was part of the ensemble cast of the hit video game adaptation A Minecraft Movie earlier this year. He also earned rave reviews as Duncan Idaho in 2021's Dune: Part One. After skipping the second film in the Timothée Chalamet–starring series, he's set to return to the for the sequel Dune: Messiah, which is now filming. Momoa can currently be seen on the nine-episode miniseries Chief Of War, which began airing on Apple TV+ on August 1. The actor — who is also an executive producer on the show — stars as the real-life warrior chief Kaʻiana, who in the late 18th century rebelled against Kamehameha I's attempts to conquer and unify the major Hawaiian islands.
Spectator
6 hours ago
- Spectator
I love how awful My Oxford Year is
The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. 'Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,' complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they're missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it's a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end, though, you will be forced to admit that you secretly enjoyed every moment, for this is the very examplar of a so-bad-it's-good masterpiece. You know it's going to be awful from the very first frame: a still representing the bookshelf of our handsome, clever and poor heroine Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson) who has come up to Oxford to spend a year doing an MA in Victorian poetry prior to taking up a job at Goldman Sachs. It includes three copies of Dover Beach & Other Poems; two Great Gatsbys; two Mansfield Parks. Yup, they couldn't be bothered to get even that detail right. Luckily, it seems that despite being a driven, brilliant high-achiever, Anna isn't really here to study. No, what she wants is romance. And who better to provide it than the handsome guy with that oh-so-cute way of biting his lower lip whom she first encounters when he splashes her with his sky-blue E-type, then meets again shortly afterwards in the chippy, whose Dick Van Dyke-style proprietor affords much opportunity for hilarious linguistic confusion. By amazing coincidence, lip-biter Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest) happens to be teaching her poetry course because, besides being incredibly rich and the son of a lord with a vast estate, he is also a postgrad with the finest mind of his generation. Not that we see much evidence of this in his seminars, which eschew close textual analysis in favour of insights such as 'Poetry can be taught. But really it should be tried' and 'Allow it to change your life!' These moony-eyed aperçus are directed shamelessly and solely at Anna, but instead of being appalled and asking for their money back, all the 15 or so NPCs at the MA seminar seem to find the flirtation charming and not at all an abuse of privilege or a waste of their course fee. Later, in the pub, Anna encounters the racism with which this mystifyingly unwoke version of Oxford is rife. Someone whose advances she rebuffs clocks her as 'Mexican' (but how? She looks and speaks like an upper-class American) and accuses her of having only got on the course as part of a diversity quota. To cheer her up, Jamie takes her to a kebab van, a gastronomic experience she finds so idyllic that when she later meets an oarsman who doesn't share her enthusiasm for grey-brown mechanically recovered rodent meat wrapped in cardboard and slimed with chilli, she identifies him instantly as a ignorant snob who doesn't even know the kebab man's first name. See what fun it is? It's like a Richard Curtis movie, but shorn of all the smugness, the emetic Blairite politics and any pretensions to be anything other than a compendium of clichés. Everything is here: the Boat Race that everyone from Oxford and Cambridge attends; the glamorous white tie Commem Ball; the montage illustrative of the developing relationship; the cheeky, outrageous gay friend; the will-they-won't-they couple who get it together right at the end just in time to cheer us up when we're feeling a bit sad that one of our protagonists is dying. Sorry for that spoiler, but come on, you can hardly not have expected it. With a generic, bitter-sweet romcom like this, of course they're going to have to wheel out the cancer plot-device to undercut all that weapons-grade saccharine with a properly teary ending. And I respect them for it. This film is tripe and it knows it's tripe. It's so bad, it makes Bridgerton look like Tarkovsky. If only more screen products were quite this endearingly frank. For more off-kilter summer merriment, I'd quite recommend another Netflix series Mandala Murders. It's about a pair of detectives – Rea Thomas (Vaani Kapoor) and Vikram Singh (Vaibhav Raj Gupta) – in the fictional town of Charandaspur in Uttar Pradesh, on the trail of whoever has been committing a series of grisly ritual murders possibly involving supernatural forces. I'm not suggesting that it's significantly better quality than My Oxford Year, but because it is made and set in India you really don't care. Whenever you tire of the confusing plot and endless flashbacks, you can distract yourself with thoughts like 'Oo, that bright painted room would make a nice boutique hotel interior' and 'Omg, he actually dived into the Ganges. I hope he got danger money for that scene' and 'That roadside chapati snack looks delicious.' Or is it just me who does that?
Metro
7 hours ago
- Metro
Hollywood star made massive life change after his body 'gave up'in near-death e
Jason Momoa has shared details of an unsettling surfing incident that endangered his life. The American actor, 45, first rose to fame starring on Baywatch: Hawaii in 1999. Earlier this week he spoke about his love of Hawaii, where he was born and then returned to for college after his family had relocated to Iowa when he was a baby. 'I love other places, and I would probably live in other places more, but this just feels like home,' he said. However, Jason has now also spoken about a near-death experience that also sparked him to make a massive life change. During an appearance on the SmartLess podcast, he told hosts Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, that he once nearly drowned while surfing with friends off the coast of Maui. He recalled they paddled 'about 13 miles down the coast' and ended up 'almost a mile offshore'. However, after the leash that connected Jason to his surfboard snapped, he was left facing '10-foot Hawaiian waves'. 'It's so windy on Maui, and so the board just went. I couldn't even see it anymore,' he said. Although he was 'trained pretty well' for rough ocean conditions, he 'took quite a few to the head' as the waves hit. 'So, I was stuck in this crazy spot, which is probably the outer reef, and unknown to me, I was really on the outer reef, and they couldn't see me, and I had my paddle, and I was waving it, and they couldn't see me. And the waves were so big, it basically took my shorts off they were so big,' he said, 'Like I literally gave up, and I'm screaming inside, and my foot just hits the outer reef.' 'I dig my feet into the coral, and I'm literally in the middle of the ocean, and I'm just, I could barely put my lips above it just to breathe and get a break, but I had already given up. So, it's like, you've already given up and died and have a second chance at it.' He said one of his friends came to the rescue, but it was 'brutal' getting out to safety, adding that his feet were 'covered in blood'. 'My daughter at that time was three months old. I just — I lost it, I was like 'Oh s***'. Although Jason's 'arms and legs gave up', one of his friends was then able to come and help rescue him. Jason said he used to smoke two to three packs of cigarettes a day before the experience. What unfolded also led Jason to quit smoking altogether. 'And we get in, and I used to smoke. I used to smoke like, two, three packs a day,' he admitted. 'I couldn't stop for my kids. Couldn't stop for my ex. I couldn't stop smoking. And the moment I came out, I never smoked again. I just died. I tried, I tried, but I couldn't do it again because I just gave up. I gave up my life.' Jason, who shares daughter Lola, 18, and son Nakoa-Wolf, 16, with ex-wife Lisa Bonet, said that he 'was pretty hard on myself that night' after getting home safely. 'I did a lot of stupid s*** and I just really was pissed at myself for the position I was in and probably tortured myself even more for the stupid s***that I did. So, I don't know. It was a bit of a hard learning curve, but I feel like I've always had that where it's just like my learning curves are pretty hard on me,' he explained. The actor is currently promoting his new Apple TV Plus series Chief of War, which tells the story of the unification of the Hawaiian Islands from an indigenous perspective. More Trending Speaking to Metro about the show, Jason explained how it enabled him to explore his roots and bring an awareness to his culture. 'I just want [viewers] to embrace it. Really, just seeing what happened in our islands. I think people come and they don't know what happened to our people. We want to be seen,' he said. View More » 'There's a lot of change and a lot to bring back of a culture that was… Our language is banned from us and we're getting it back. A lot of our art…we're part of America and I don't think anyone really knows anything about us.' Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Kid Cudi 'hated every minute' of testifying against Sean 'Diddy' Combs MORE: Leonardo DiCaprio reveals his 'biggest regret' after turning down surprising 90s role MORE: James Cameron struggling to write 'new Terminator film' over stark sci-fi fears
