Critic Reviews

Westerns can be a tough nut to crack, but Hostiles may be the finest example of the genre since "Unforgiven."

Once feared dead but found instead only sleeping, the western has sprung back to strong and compelling life with the intense, involving Hostiles being the latest case in point.

The movie, written for the screen and directed by Scott Cooper (who helmed Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance in "Crazy Heart"), is careful not to demonize anyone and make the path to redemption both slow and methodical.

Bale, in a piercing, quietly devastating performance, holds the film's center with commanding authority. It's a film whose brute force tempered with contemplative grace. It's a potent and prodigious achievement.

Hostiles is not for the faint of heart, but it winds up being about having a heart in a world that seems almost without hope.

If you’ve got a hankering for a Western, Hostiles is must-viewing.

Contemplative and absorbing rather than rip-roaring and exciting, the film will likely play better to Western connoisseurs than to general and younger audiences, but it's an estimable piece of work grounded by a fine-grain sensibility and an expertly judged lead performance.

Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s mournful meditation on human nature, is more than a revisionist Western; it’s a film that explores the roots of racism and the cost of redemption.

Hostiles itself wants to be both a throwback and an advance, not so much a new kind of western as every possible kind — vintage, revisionist, elegiac, feminist. What makes the movie interesting is the sincerity and intelligence with which it pursues that ambition, heroically unaware that the mission is doomed from the start.

At times, you'll find yourself wanting more of the perspective of the Cheyenne, but Cooper still does right by his story of historical reconciliation, charting Blocker’s moral transformation plausibly. Hostiles‘ disarming finale packs an earned, radiantly optimistic punch.