It's all Clint Eastwood's fault. 1992's Unforgiven reinvented and rebooted the western, a genre that had long fallen into cliché. Unforgiven took the tired tropes and turned them around, 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.
And filmmakers have been following that lead ever since, with western-style movies telling much more nuanced stories with much more complex characters and often, much more violence too. These three films all use the western genre, they're all on Netflix and they all have 90% plus on Rotten Tomatoes, but they tell very different stories. Bone Tomahawk shares some of its DNA with From Dusk Till Dawn in its lurid, over-the-top violence, while The Furnace takes the familiar trope of gold-driven greed, transplants it to the Outback and uses it to shine a light on Australian history.
And while Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog takes place beneath widescreen skies, the story it tells is much smaller and considerably more claustrophobic. All could rank among the best Netflix movies – so see which one takes your fancy as the perfect weekend watch. Bone Tomahawk " Bone Tomahawk surges head first into violence with absolute courage and graphic disregard," says Every Movie Has A Lesson , and that's probably an understatement: this is an exceptionally violent movie that definitely isn't for the squeamish.
As Ireland's The Herald put it: "For 100 minutes or so, Bone Tomahawk plays out.