Hell or High Water

And the Oscar for non-stop pure redneck neo-western goes to? David Mackenzie, who has handled an uninteresting material decently, creating a swaggering retro one-off with a boisterous Jeff Bridges the way we like him and a wacky Ben Foster the way we absolutely love him. Oddly enough, it also works quite well as an interesting probe amongst working-class Midwesterners. It doesn’t have any bigger ambitions, but it’s good for a Saturday siesta. (11/19/2016)

The film had a great theme, a good cast, a decent atmosphere, and finally some politically incorrect humor. I had fun, but... everything I just mentioned was spoiled by the ridiculously slow pacing. If you want to use long shots of the landscape, don’t pick Texas where everything looks the same. I was strongly surprised by the lack of negative characters. Even the lawyer was a good guy, so the mortgage guy was left to pick up the slack. What I liked was the rather unexpected ending. 3*+ (07/08/2018)

I found the term contemporary western a bit shocking at the start, but after all why not. The film takes place in Texas and apart from the kind-hearted sheriff, who is brilliantly portrayed by Jeff Bridges, there are also two guys who rob banks and I spent the entire movie trying to understand them, which, honestly, I couldn’t accomplish and the final punchline of the film doesn’t help it either. Nevertheless, thanks to the setting and the exemplary introduction to the Texan character, which takes shit from no one and nothing, this film is worth seeing. I also feel that this is the reason why this movie was actually made. It’s like a recruitment video: “Become a Texan… if you have the balls.” Addendum: And now we are going to play the movie Hell or High Water for you, which will present us in the rawest form and on top of that you will get to enjoy some beautiful scenery, which the director of photography used to emphasise the beauty of the scorched wasteland. (01/30/2017)

The pure essence of Cormack McCarthy, about which regular adaptations of his works can just dream about. Without exaggeration, the best film neo-western, watching which you will be astonished on how many levels it works, without any possible "but". It works smoothly as a genre movie, as a study of magnificently written (and without exception equally magnificently played) characters, as a hypnotic movie that raises emotions benefiting from Cave and endless Texas distances, as well as a camera that does them justice as a reflection of time and a social insight into the soul of the had-working Republican class, which has nothing, banks are bullying them and circumstances force them to take one credit after another and who get from one debt to another (no other film will show you in such an illustrative and nonviolent way why America chose Trump), as a textbook of minimalist dialogs "about something", even if seemingly "about nothing", like... Well, I could continue for hours and hours in the same way. For many years, I have not seen a movie that would so skillfully blur the line between pure genre pleasure and existential festival movie. For me, it's simply an instant classic, and not just within the "Peckinpah" genre. (11/15/2016)

Texas has got something about it. The Southern atmosphere drips from each shot. McCarthy’s redneck poeticism engulfs you and Cave and Ellis have the lion´s share in this. A story about two brothers and their plan to overcome adversity embodied in bank clerks. Bridges’ lines are perfect, Foster is nicely crazy, Pine intentionally minimalistic. A modern western at its best. Sometimes even a blind pig can find its way to the trough. (12/04/2016)