Opens Friday! Hell or High Water: The best-reviewed film of the year

'Hell or High Water' is the year's most exhilarating film

REVIEW: New movie offers a different take on The Hollywood western |

★★★★ out of 4 stars

By David Edelstein, New York Magazine                                                 Aug 11, 2016 | 11:36am

Ben Foster and Chris Pine bank some great performances as desperate robbers in "Hell or High Water." (Lorey Sebastian)

“Hell or High Water” is the best movie I’ve seen all year -- all last year, too. It’s still haunting me, especially the last scene, a face-off, but not the kind you usually see in Westerns.

It’s not an Old West Western. It’s set in the present, and the West (here, West Texas) is a different place. There are still cowboys and Indians, except the Native Americans watch whites who took their land get their land taken by someone else -- the banks.

“Hell or High Water” has two protagonists: a robber and a ranger. Chris Pine plays the rancher who was upright all his life, but for reasons we don’t get until the last half-hour enlists his unstable ex-con brother (played by Ben Foster) in a scheme to get money fast.

They target branches of the Texas Midlands Bank in small towns separated by large deserts.

The other protagonist is the aging Texas Ranger played by Jeff Bridges. He doesn’t think the robbers are the usual meth-heads or sociopaths. But he knows that sooner or later someone will die, if only because he sees lots of ordinary Texans carrying guns, looking eager to use them.

In most Westerns, violence seems the only possible resolution. But in “Hell or High Water,” the terrific British director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan have fashioned a great humanist Western: You know there will be blood and pray there won’t be, because it’s bound to be absurd and needlessly final. It’s finality that’s the true villain -- meaning actions that can’t be undone, bullets that can’t go back in the barrel.

The movie has a starkness, a terrible clarity that eats into your mind. It’s a new classic Western.

"Much more than a genre piece, 'Hell or High Water' takes you places that you thought the big screen had forgotten." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Jeff Bridges delivers as a Ranger on the brothers’ trail. | CBS Films

Watch: 'Hell or Highwater' Official Trailer