Hell or High water (2016)

Hell or High water (2016)

Movie Rating 7.8/10

R | 1h 42min | Crime, Drama, Western

Director: David Mackenzie

Writer: Taylor Sheridan

Stars: Dale Dickey, Ben Foster, Chris Pine

Story line

Following a series of armed robberies at a number of branches of Texas Midland Bank where very little money was taken, the motive of unemployed oil and gas worker Toby Howard (Chris Pine) and his brother -- just released from prison -- is to raise enough money to pay off the reverse mortgage that will forfeit their recently deceased mother's ranch if not paid off. Oil was discovered on the ranch and in order to secure the future of his sons and ex wife, Toby needs $43,000.

IMDB link  Here

Movie Rating ★★★★☆

 Sharp western for the Occupy generation  

Jeff Bridges shares top billing with the Texas landscape in a heist thriller shot through with acidic humour  

A pair of estranged Texan brothers are reunited against a common foe – the bank that gypped their father into signing away the family farm and now threatens to foreclose on the loan. Straight arrow Toby (Chris Pine) and ex-con loose cannon Tanner (Ben Foster) stage a series of heists against various branches of the bank, all the while pursued by Jeff Bridges, on deliciously crusty form as a Texas ranger nearing the end of his career. Part heist, part western for the Occupy generation, this sharply plotted thriller is a triumph for both director David Mackenzie and writer Taylor Sheridan (Sicario). Mackenzie makes effective use of the hard-baked Texas landscape, which seems to consist entirely of grit and grudges. And Sheridan’s acidic humour brings a spiky levity to some scenes – a ferociously charmless waitress in a steak restaurant is a particular high point.

 Read full review  at The Guardian

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Brit director David Mackenzie follows his searing 2013 prison drama, Starred Up, with a deep dive into archetypal Americana in Hell or High Water, a modern Western thriller that combines many of the same strengths as that earlier film. Those notably include unsettling violence and textural grit coupled with compassionate insight in a story that observes the behavioral codes of damaged men in a broken world. Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan's script is sharper in its character-driven crime spree and chase mechanics than in its too-pointed social contextualization within a milieu bled dry by bankers. But sweaty performances, tight direction and evocative visuals keep the drama compelling.

Following its premiere in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section, the CBS Films release will open Aug. 12 in a limited rollout that deserves to find a receptive niche audience — although a less generic title would help. Its best marketing assets will be the magnetic appeal of Chris Pine and Ben Foster, playing semi-estranged brothers drawn together by pressing need, and a wonderful character turn from Jeff Bridges, delivering his most flavorful work since the Coens' True Grit.

Sheridan's screenplay effectively juxtaposes two pairs of unlikely buddies. On the wrong side of the law are siblings Toby (Pine) and Tanner (Foster), who grew up in poverty on a West Texas cattle ranch that's been failing for as long as either of them can remember; Tanner got out of prison a year earlier and remained absent throughout the difficult, slow death of their mother. On the side of the badge are soon-to-retire Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Bridges) and his deputy Alberto (Gil Birmingham), who endures the bantering insults of his boss about his mixed Native American-Mexican heritage, firing back with digs about the old dude's creeping decrepitude.

Mackenzie's sinewy direction makes the robbery sequences bristle with their sudden jolts of violence, and the getaway action and car chases charge up the atmosphere between dialogue-based scenes. Canny casting of character actors like Dale Dickey and Buck Taylor as bank staffers and customers also enhances the film's highly specific regional color. While the setting is present-day, the film was obviously made before open-carry laws were passed in Texas. But the concealed-carry factor adds amusing moments of unpredictable cowboy behavior as the vigilante mentality of locals kicks in.

Where Sheridan's script shows the writer's hand at work more laboriously is in the frequent mentions of how the banks are robbing people blind as they struggle to make an honest living, particularly in sectors like farming where children can't get away fast enough from the family history of hardship. There are lovely moments, too, however, such as a scene in which a diner waitress (Katy Mixon) establishes a gentle connection with sexy, taciturn Toby and then turns feisty later that day when Marcus asks her to hand over as evidence the $200 tip he left that will go toward her mortgage.

Commentary about the place of Native Americans in the contemporary landscape is also woven into the script, notably in scenes in which the brothers cross state lines into Oklahoma to launder the stolen cash at a casino. The theme is also present in Marcus' needling mockery of Alberto. Their superbly played exchanges are terrific — graced with low-key humor but also poignancy as the affection and loneliness beneath the widowed older man's teasing become evident. That aspect gets a resonant payoff in the drama's final act.

Bridges fully embraces the crusty screen persona of his late-stage career to tremendously enjoyable effect. He chews on his words like tobacco in a performance that expertly balances deadpan with depth, making it clear that all those extra years have done nothing to blunt Marcus' quicksilver intelligence. Birmingham makes a strong foil; Alberto gives as good as he gets, without concealing his bruised dignity. Pine also does nuanced work, exploring the burdens of a brooding man determined to make up for past mistakes. And Foster is a livewire rascal whose sense of sibling loyalty provides a subtle emotional undercurrent with notes of atonement.

As much as all four men are familiar types, the director, writer and actors imbue them with humanity, steering their arcs through tense action — including a nice throwback Western shootout on rocky terrain — to a quietly moving conclusion.

Shot in New Mexico, the film has an atmospheric sense of place that owes much to Giles Nuttgens' handsome cinematography and eloquent framing. From the expansive exteriors of endless flat land soaked in sleepy sunlight, beneath vast canopies of low-hanging clouds, to the warmly lit interiors, there are constant visual pleasures. Melancholy shots of half-dead towns with their weathered storefronts, abandoned pastures scattered with rusted farm equipment, and fields where cattle once grazed, now given over to oil derricks pecking at the ground, make the movie an elegy for a lost way of life. And with it, a defining regional identity. Also enhancing those images and that theme is the somber scoring of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, whose music has often served as an expressive bridge between the Old and New West.

Read full review at The Hollywood Reporter

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆   

 Chase movie with a conscience

Jeff Bridges doesn’t have much difficulty playing a racially insensitive Texas Ranger in Hell or High Water: on the scale between 1 (articulating normally) and the barely-comprehensible 10 of his True Grit performance, this salty character turn probably rates around a 6.

Chasing a pair of cowboy bank robbers halfway across the state, Bridges’s Marcus is in cinema’s long tradition of cracker Texas lawmen – but on the more rational end. He might drive his mixed-race partner (Gil Birmingham) up the wall with “half-breed” slurs, intended as dry jokes, but Marcus isn’t anything like the despicable tyrant that Bridges’ virtual twin, Kris Kristofferson, played in John Sayles’s Lone Star. He believes in the law, doesn’t suffer fools, and speaks – or gurgles – in that basso profundo way Bridges has, whatever’s on his mind.

This muscular heist thriller has contemporary western stylings, and a surprising source – David Mackenzie, the British director of Young Adam and Starred Up. Give Mackenzie a script this good – it’s a potboiler with depth, from Sicario writer Taylor Sheridan – and his game is raised accordingly. It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster have a rock-solid brotherly double act happening as, respectively, Toby and Tanner, the two grubbily unshaven modern outlaws Bridges is closing in on. Tanner’s done jail time, and he’s the one who knows, or thinks he knows, how to go about pulling off a string of bank robberies.

Toby, a beginner at this, is the one in dire need: not only is he a divorced father of two boys, with alimony, but the fictitious Texas Midland bank is about to foreclose on their late mother’s property, which has a gold mine, or rather an oil mine, right underneath it.

The brothers’ Robin Hood-like scheme is to hit, again and again, branches of the very bank that wittingly sold their mom an unpayable mortgage – essentially robbing Peter to pay Peter, if they can purloin enough before the foreclosure deadline. The villain, then, is the US financial system, and the backdrop economic misery – debt relief billboards by the roadsides, waitresses and casino escorts desperate to make ends meet.

This regional focus is a really strong foundation for a film that’s deeper than it looks, a chase movie with a moral conscience that’s neither obvious nor one-sided. Sheridan’s script, once called Comancheria after the original Native American occupation in this bit of Texas, feels modestly influenced in its hard-boiled banter by the Elmore Leonards and James Lee Burkes of this world, but there’s a fair smattering of Cormac McCarthy in here too. It’s hard to ignore how similarly it plays to No Country for Old Men, albeit with two Josh Brolins, and Bridges in the Tommy Lee Jones role.

Since the filmmakers are soon bound to get royally fed up with this comparison, they might prefer to hear that their film’s leaner, cleaner, and much less pretentious in its notions of good and evil. No one is exactly either – everyone has bills to pay and sympathetic people do unforgivable things. “Comanche”, as an insulted poker rival tells Foster’s character with danger in his eyes, means “enemy of everyone”. Texas is all one big hustle.

Pine, ever-improving, notches up new respect here for his stalwart underplaying, and Foster’s on fire: his late action scene with a machine gun is hilariously bad-ass, and shot with satisfying, let’s-do-this verve by Giles Nuttgens. The film also shares a cast member the Coens used: a venerable Texan actress called Margaret Bowman, who gets one film-stealing scene, credited as “T-Bone Waitress” – she spits out her lines with such deadly sass it’s only fair not to spoil her punchlines.

But the Bridges-Birmingham dynamic has real wit and submerged feeling, too, as they trade barbs in grisly motel rooms, or stake out an as-yet-unraided Texas Midland branch which Marcus thinks the brothers will hit next.

The verbal showdowns match the fusillades. For a pacy cops-and-robbers exercise, it doesn’t only have smart things to say, but even smarter ways to put them.

Read full Review at Telegraph

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Movie Rating ★★★★  

 Guns fired and cliches dodged in sharp-eyed western

Hell or High Water is a contemporary western with pick-up trucks instead of horses.

But some things never change. In this stretch of west Texas, cowboy hats are still in fashion, everyone carries a gun and everyone still hates the banks. So when two brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster), start robbing them, some of their neighbours are not exactly outraged. It's only when Tanner begins killing people that the mood shifts.

The film is the work of American screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) and British director David Mackenzie, best known for Young Adam (2003), a terse, sexy thriller which had Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton caught up in an illicit and obsessive affair in the dank confines of a barge on the Scottish canals. And this film is just as sharp-eyed and unsentimental in weighing up the consequences of the illicit.

Toby, the "good" brother, begins by believing it's possible to steal in a worthy cause. The bank has been exploiting his elderly mother for years. It has lent her just enough money to keep the family farm from going under in the expectation it will eventually be able to step in and claim whatever is left. Now she is dead and foreclosure is imminent. Why shouldn't he steal enough to take back what is rightfully his? That's his argument.

Tanner, in contrast, has no patience with argument, reasonable or otherwise. He enjoys making mayhem and initially this fundamental difference between the brothers looks as if it's going to be played out in cliched style as a standard battle of opposites. But gradually, the script goes deeper. We learn something of the abusive father who set Tanner on the path towards the prison sentence he has just completed. We glimpse Toby's love for him, which persists no matter what. And there's a rare flash of Toby's own propensity for violence. He lets rip when two young thugs draw a gun on Tanner in a random attack at a petrol station.

However, we're left to guess at the cause of the marriage break-up which has left him with an overriding desire to do right by his two young sons – despite the sullen scepticism of his ex-wife.

It's a skilfully judged performance by Pine, who seems to be cultivating a healthy career in independent movies in parallel with his life in blockbusters as Star Trek's Captain Kirk. Here, he could easily have been sidelined as a blue-eyed foil for Foster, whose frenetic energy tends to fill the frame. But there's a watchful intelligence in the way he responds. You can tell from his silences that as much as he loves his brother, he's appalled by him.

The film's other half belongs to Jeff Bridges as Marcus Hamilton, the Texas ranger who is pursuing the brothers with his fellow ranger, Alberto Parker. These two entertain themselves with banter. Marcus has to put up with Alberto's remarks about his impending retirement, which he's dreading. The spectre of the rocking chair on the porch is his personal vision of purgatory. In retaliation, he teases Alberto with continuous riffs about his Mexican and Native American heritage.

Most of the time, this repartee is good-natured, born of a mutual fondness, along with a jocular contempt for political correctness. But behind the jokes is an elegiac sense of an era coming to a close. Marcus comes out of the same tradition as Tommy Lee Jones's ageing sheriff in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men (2007). He was also brooding on the end of his working life.

But Bridges keeps it light. The deceptively lazy drawl, the studied air of self-deprecation, the smooth flow of wisecracks and the seeming imperturbability all paint a picture of a man with all the time in the world.  Inevitably, the plot climaxes with a shootout – an ugly, bumbling confrontation in the desert with no winners. But it doesn't finish there. These are the kind of characters who travel on in your imagination long after the end credits have rolled. They offer more confirmation of the fact that the western is still a genre with plenty left to say.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

Director David Mackenzie's Starred Up demonstrated his immense talent at depicting realistic character-driven narratives in which the intimacy of personal relationships speak to larger themes of power dynamics, dominance, redemption, and the moral ambiguity that defines those aspects of our society. He has a knack for making even unsavory, unsympathetic characters seem relatable and relevant to his audience's own feelings and experiences, despite how dramatically different from us the characters appear on the surface. But Mackenzie knows the truth always lies somewhere below the surface -- for ourselves, for our world, and for the people populating his films -- so he takes us beneath the surface without denying the existence of all of the more overt traits and flaws and scars. Indeed, what is most impressive is that nowhere will you find excuses made for the devils sitting on these people's shoulders tempting them to give in to their worst instincts and tendencies; instead, Mackenzie so humanizes the characters, we understand that nobody has to be defined solely by the worst things they've done, and we see their lives with enough perspective to weigh their wrongs alongside the full sum of their lives and actions within the larger context of our world.

It's possible to look at another human being's life long enough that you grasp the fundamental elements that define human experience. Some of it is good, some is bad, and most is one or the other only when perceived in a context surrounded by moral ambiguities that can tilt just enough to shift things in favor or against the person and the actions. What is wrong at face value can become good in the right context, just as the seeming good can serve ill purposes or the worst outcomes if we witness a long enough timeline. And therein lies the larger message of Hell or High Water, that if we stare long enough, everything that seems good might be revealed as bad, and everything that seems bad might be revealed as good. It might just be about a silver lining in a storm cloud, or even some righteous truth arising from a horrible singular event, but it's all about the context, and context ultimately is all about perception -- the perception of flawed human beings, for whom context is simply a big picture filled in with all of our own baggage and moral ambiguities and truths.

Two brothers doing something wrong. Except they have a reason. Except the reason is selfish. Except the selfishness actually transcends each man's own self. Except one of them is, at heart, bad. Except one of them is, at heart, good. Except the good has flaws that make him capable of doing outright evil things. Except he does them in service to what he thinks is a greater good. Except he allies with his bad brother to achieve that greater good, doing greater wrong along the way. Except the bad brother is acting for the greater good, too. Except one man's greater good requires harming other's greater goods and lives. Except all of these people and their actions and their choices are their own, they are responsible for what they do and what they allow to be done in their name, as are all of us. Except we live in a world where forces larger than ourselves act upon us in obvious and secret ways every moment, and on every single one of our apparent choices, and on the outcomes of all of our choices, so much so that it's nearly impossible to truly have freedom to follow our own path without admitting that path is largely defined by forces larger than any one of us or many of us.

Banks take people's homes, often -- maybe even usually, some would claim -- through manipulation and predatory practices. But banks are just brick buildings, paper entities, financial institutions, inanimate objects that only exist and live and take action because people inhabit them and create them and make choices within them. Banks don't really do anything, the people who run them and work in them do. Sometimes one person, sometimes many people, collectively give money or take money, help people own homes or effectively try to steal people's homes while remaining just within the technical limits of the law. We as a society want banks, need banks, allow banks to exist, allow them to help us or harm us, by our choices to be part of them or use them or ignore the harm they do or by making laws together that allow all of this to exist and continue apace.

It's a testament to the strength of Taylor Sheridan's screenplay that so much thoughtful subtext and powerful moral examinations are conveyed through seemingly simple, straightforward characters. I say "seemingly" because of course what the story is demonstrating is that nobody is really simple and straightforward, at least when it comes to the context of our lives and choices and morality. Communication between these characters is loaded with meaning beneath meaning, even when they simply mean exactly what they say.

The story gets so much out of so seemingly little, as when a brother comes home for the first time in a long while and looks into the empty bed where his mother died. There's not much dialogue that confronts the loss and the brother's absence, it's all basically small talk -- exactly the sort real people make when they don't know how to convey the emotions building inside them that defy the ability of words to appropriately express -- and it's a painful, tragic moment on a very personal level for these two brothers.

There's no melodrama to the moment, though, nor too much attention drawn to it -- it's short, just a few quips and a facial expressions -- but we get it, and in our guts we understand what's happening when the Ranger gets up and takes his beer to go sit alone outside and contemplate the fact he wants the other man's company more than the other man wants his.

It is only by being the "bad" brother on a team with his "good" brother, that the bad one can explore his better nature -- even as that better nature manifests through a combination of selflessness and terrible villainy, with increasing degrees of selflessness and evil. The same is true of the good brother, who needs to do bad and so contacts his bad brother to help out, and then by playing the role of the "robber with the conscience" on their team he is able to let himself commit crimes and evil deeds, and to admit that within his understandable ulterior motives lies a darkness arising from his own personal nature.

Sheridan's original screenplay for Sicario was impressive enough to earn a nomination from the Writers Guild last year, and deservedly so. That exceptional film signaled the arrival of a great new writer capable of using modern relevant events and experiences to examine broader points about society, human experience, and how our conception of right and wrong often survive only until the moment they are tested against reality

Of course, while the writing and directing are extraordinary in Hell or High Water, the final ingredient that helps make it the year's best film to date is the cast. Chris Pine and Ben Forest give career-best performances as the bank-robbing brothers. Pine's ability to appear so earnest and out of his element, so charming and well-intentioned, yet then reveal the malevolence that swims beneath the surface of his personality -- barely restrained sometimes -- is a greater display of a similar sort of duality in Pine's small but impressive role in Z For Zachariah. There's a scene between Pine and Jeff Bridges (who plays the soon-to-be-retired Texas Ranger) that so confounds our sense of right and wrong, our sense of who these men are and what's transpired, that it might be the single most complex character scene of any movie I've watched all year.

Foster is marvelous and Oscar-worthy as the "bad" brother, demonstrating an impulsive and violently anti-social nature undercut by a sense of humor and self-assured casualness that, combined with his love for his brother and intense loyalty to their cause, makes it all the more troubling and in fact outright infuriating when he commits a few particularly evil acts. We don't want him to be too bad because we want to like him and to keep rooting for him. But the film doesn't let us off that easily, and to force us to confront our perceptions of morality and judgment of other people, it doesn't just let Foster be bad, it trains the camera's eye directly on these moments so we cannot deny them or forget them. Foster has been great many times on screen, but here is a role allowing him to demonstrate his talents to the fullest, and the result is one of the most memorable, enjoyable, complex characters of any picture all year.

Jeff Bridges is never less than outstanding, and I think he'll get another Oscar nomination for his role in Hell or High Water. His Ranger doesn't let us in too often, but much of the pleasure of the performance is in all the ways he tries to hold us off and often only halfway succeeds. When we do finally get momentary glimpses, they are all the more poignant and gut-punching precisely because we've watched him fight so hard to maintain his crumbling exterior facade. He is a metaphor for a way of life, for a self-perception among a generation and a state and a lifestyle, and he represents its faults, its decline, and yet also its resilience and determination to defy our expectations each time we think its time has come.

Gil Birmingham is a wonderful foil to Bridges as the other Texas Ranger, tolerating the outdated political incorrectness of Bridges' sense of humor and the older man's decision-making that doesn't countenance challenge or debate. When it becomes obvious Bridges makes a mistake while trying to anticipate the moves of the bank robbers, the older man can't bring himself to fully admit it and instead becomes flustered at Birmingham's satirical notation of the error. It is that presumption of entitlement, a sort all too familiar of course to a man of Mexican-Comanche heritage living in Texas, that makes Birmingham's calm demeanor all the more impressive during their investigation.

In many ways, Hell or High Water reminds me of No Country For Old Men, as both explore violence and criminality in the modern world as a way to speak to larger truths about how we judge one another, and how we perceive right and wrong. Our place within the world as individuals, and our place within the social collective, are questioned and revealed as in tension with ourselves every bit as much as we feel in tension with the rest of society (as a whole and as a bunch of individuals). How are we corrupted by the world around us as we are forced to compromise our beliefs about morality to conform to reality? And how is the world around us corrupted by each of us and all of us together, as we force the world to conform to our compromised moral vision of reality?

The film features original music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, but also some popular songs recorded previously. That means the score won't be eligible for an Oscar nod. Which is a shame, because it's a remarkable soundtrack surpassing anything else I've heard all year. Indeed, this is the best film score I've heard since... well, since Jóhann Jóhannsson's score for Sicario last year, which I loved as much as I love Hell or High Water's score.

Hell or High Water is one of the great modern westerns and Hell or High Water is just the sort of substantive food for the soul we all need to experience.

 Read Full Review at Forbes

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Movie Rating ★★★★★   

Two bank-robbing brothers run riot in Texas in one of the films of the year

A superb modern-day western, Hell Or High Water is in various ways evocative of the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men, and of a pair of classic films of the late Sixties, George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie And Clyde.

Yet it is also gloriously singular, and one of the best pictures I have seen all year.

Bridges, who spends the film appearing to chew the cud like a Longhorn steer, gives one of the finest performances of his long career. Which is lofty praise indeed.

He is not the only class act, however. Pine finds depths pretty well hidden in those all-action beefcake roles of his, and while Foster’s versatility is already evident from films such as The Program, in which he played the cyclist Lance Armstrong, he is at the top of his game, too.

Teasing the best out of both his cast and the Texas landscape is David Mackenzie, the Scotsman whose last film was 2013’s brutal, but brilliant, prison drama, Starred Up.

Here he shows that he is as adept at generating tension in wide-open spaces as in claustrophobic cells. Indeed, Hell Or High Water, at one level, is a kind of visual hymn to rural Texas.

The camera lingers so lovingly on its vast expanses, its oil derricks, those interminable goods trains, that you’d swear the director hailed from nearer Dallas than Dundee.

Mackenzie, and his screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (whose impressive cv also includes last year’s splendid thriller Sicario), have pulled off something really clever here, a film with two sets of protagonists, both tugging equally on audience loyalties. Even more cleverly, those loyalties keep being tested.

Toby seems about as decent as a bank-robber can be, but he has been a poor father and husband, making this an exercise in redemption, although that, too, is undermined when one of the heists goes fatally wrong.

Moreover, although it is a deadly serious film, gritty and nasty when it needs to be, there is an undercurrent of humour best exemplified by a priceless exchange with a crotchety old waitress when the rangers sit down to eat in a small-town diner.

She is played by Margaret Bowman, who played an equally crotchety motel manager in No Country For Old Men, so maybe this is Mackenzie’s little nod of homage to the Coen brothers. If so, they should be flattered. He is a fine filmmaker.

Read full review at Daily Mail

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Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges face off in modern Western

One of the great pleasures in modern movies is watching Jeff Bridges peer a long, long way over a pair of reading glasses, chew on a private thought for a second or two and then roll the next line of dialogue out of his mouth, like an Atomic Fireball. He's a paradox: a joyously authentic hambone. And he's one of many successful elements of the sentimental, violent, irresistible new crime thriller "Hell or High Water."

If you like, call it a Western. It's a Western old-fashioned enough to risk cliches about honorably lawless men. It's also modern enough to know these folks' time and place cannot last forever, and that the movie itself is already a thing, a very entertaining thing, of the recent past.

"Hell or High Water" harks back to 1970s elegies for the Old West: "The Last Picture Show," "Fat City," "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot." In broad terms, progress is the enemy, and fairness is the casualty: The banks and America's financial near-meltdown of 2008 loom large in the story's background. The message, if there is one, is what you might call inoffensively political. Who doesn't think ill of Big Money?

Yet like a lot of good Westerns it plays with all sorts of audiences, right, left and center. If moviegoers find this film, set in West Texas and co-starring Chris Pine and Ben Foster as a couple of sympathetic bank-robbing brothers on a righteous spree, it may turn into one of those rare uniters, not dividers, of the 2016 movie landscape.

Originally titled "Comancheria," the Comanche name for much of the region depicted here, Sheridan's script respects the wiles and street smarts of most every character, major and minor, mostly males. In one exception to that rule, a hilariously foul-tempered waitress delivers a monologue about the perils of not ordering the T-bone in her establishment, and simply for the way this speech deploys the word "trout," as the worst kind of epithet, it's a gem. There are times in "Hell or High Water" when the roiling resentments against the banking industry start sounding a little speech-y in a less effective way. Throughout the story you're well aware of everything Sheridan and director Mackenzie do to keep the brothers in our good graces.

But the actors are terrific. Pine shifts keys very shrewdly for this man of tamped-down regrets, and he does the least conspicuous and the best acting of his career. Foster delineates both sides of his live-wire role, the troublemaker and the brother who knows his screw-ups cause his family no little grief. Like Sheridan's "Sicario" script, "Hell or High Water" has one foot in pulp conventions, and the other in some stimulating, morally tricky contemporary answers to those conventions. What the movie has, above all, is a dramatic line, clean and straight. In its faces, its scenery and its plain satisfactions it makes us feel like we've been somewhere, when we get to the end of that line.

 Read full review at Chicago Tribune

☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺

Hell or High Water Floats on Craggy Jeff Bridges

The performances are quietly terrific

Jeff Bridges is now at the point in his long, polychrome career where he has perfected the art of playing the crusty old coot. It’s not as easy as it looks. You can’t just hand your audience a whiskery bouquet of squintin’ and bellyachin’ and call it a day. But Bridges knows just what he’s doing, and with the splendid West Texas waltz of a drama, Hell or High Water, British director David Mackenzie has given him the perfect hook on which to hang his hat.

The plot is clever, and its intricacies are beautifully worked out. (The script is by actor-writer Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote Sicario.) Mostly, though, Hell or High Water works because Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens are so alive to the desolate bloom of the West Texas landscape, to the way its heat can seem devil red hot, dust yellow or completely colorless depending on the time of day and the direction of the wind.

Mackenzie isn’t a newcomer; he has made a number of marvelous, somewhat underappreciated movies, like the dreamy plague romance (yes, there can be such a thing) Perfect Sense from 2011, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green. But Hell or High Water will be his breakthrough. It owes a debt to 1970s bank-robbery classics like Dog Day Afternoon but also carries some DNA threads of existential rubber-meets-road meditations like Vanishing Point. And as those movies did in their day, Hell or High Water captures the free-floating anxieties–and, even more crucially, the near boiling anger and frustration–of our own era. This is a classic story about the little guy who fights back, though its rough justice is tempered by a sense of decency. The bad guys may be charismatic, but not everything they do is excusable. Sometimes their actions are anguishing to watch.

The performances here are uniformly and quietly terrific. Pine is particularly striking–his gait may appear laid-back and cool, but he lets us see the tension in every muscle. And then there’s Bridges’ Marcus, shaggy and worn but not yet played out. Marcus is on the cusp of retirement and unsure, as we are, how his constant stream of muttering and complaining will translate to life in the rocking chair. This is a man who wears his flaws boldly. He’s borderline racist–actually, he probably goes right over the border–in the way he ribs his long-suffering half-Comanche partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham). But when one of the brother-robbers’ victims, a shy young clerk, apologizes for not knowing the make of their getaway car, Marcus teases helpful information out of her with a kind of craggy tenderness. And when the movie hits a tense turning point–one that’s likely to shake you even if you thought you saw it coming–Marcus responds with a strangled, anguished cry that seems to emerge less from his gut than from the earth itself. For Bridges, the old-coot handbook is old hat. He’d rather write new pages, dashing them off one by one with a grunt, a scowl and a flourish.

 Read full review at Time