And why isn't Masanobu Takayanagi in awards season discussion for best cinematography? Every shot is gorgeous. I got to see on a large screen in the theater... I recommend you do the same. Shot on 35mm.

Arclight Hollywood.

2017: the year of timothèe

“Hostiles,” a sturdy and characteristically brutal new Western from “Black Mass” director Scott Cooper, begins with somebody shooting a baby — that’s not a spoiler, just a warning. The year is 1892, and a settler named Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike) is teaching her young daughters about the magical power of adverbs. Suddenly, their New Mexico homestead is raided by a band of Comanche renegades. They murder her husband, they shoot her two girls, and they fire a bullet directly into her infant son; Rosalee carries the lifeless bundle in her arms for days, because it’s that kind of movie — the only kind that Cooper knows how to make.

READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

Mostly on autopilot. Like I was thinking it was weird that Ben Foster wasn't in this and then yep, Ben Foster shows up. Anyway there are lots of guys who shouldn't be taking a pass at THE SEARCHERS and Scott Cooper is definitely one of them.

I liked the mustaches, but wow... what a faux-prestige shitpile of stale ideas.  Not even excellent facial hair could save this from its own meandering, pointless self. From top to bottom, a goddamned disaster. Fuck.

It is difficult to feel empathy for those who have committed what are, in today's terms, war crimes. Hostiles tried to, and to some degree does, accomplish this task mostly because of how beautifully its shot and how well its acted.

Well I was writing a funny review and then the last thirty seconds happened and now I’m emotional so gtg

(Watched this on the plane to Rome!)

Hostiles answers the question of whether or not Christian Bale can
deliver a voice sillier than his Batman growl. The answer is yes and
the resulting movie feels like an extension of a filmmaker who earnestly still makes Jeff Hardy compilation videos scored to Creed. Or maybe this is what happens when a dweeb from the suburbs goes to Westworld for his freshmen year roommate-cum-long lost best friend's bachelor party but then the future brother in law gets weird about all the hardcore debauchery so they monologue in overwrought brosciency ways of the
warrior lingolese until they shoot, stab, or choke somebody again.
It's easy to believe the great grandsons of these soldiers piloting
the cartoon tanks of David Goyer's interminable exercise in faux
gravitas Fury (2014) or would prefer scalping and degrading each other
in a Grim 'n' Gritty Jonah Hex comic. Even more egregious than the
corniness is the utter waste of a brilliant cast.

Honest to God, I wanna see ONE revisionist Western where the Native American dialogue isn't at all stylized or gnomic. I wanna be reading Cheyenne subtitles and see "ah, fuck, there's six of them, we need to plan a strategy to take them out." None of this THE BITE OF THE RATTLESNAKE IS FELT BEFORE THE SERPENT'S HEAD IS SEEN shit. Wes Studi can do it in his sleep, but it's beneath him, and frankly me.

I've expected much more from this one. Christian as always good but everything else is pure rewrite of history.

Hostiles is a dark and gritty tale of the violent wild west where men are unmoved by the taking of lives, yet struggle to lose them. Visually it's impressive, but for the story it told, it could've been shorter. I feel like I have to watch it again to pick up any deeper meanings it may have proposed, which is sort of a problem in itself, but other than the movie being kind of slow, I had a pretty good time.

A surprisingly effective although somewhat surface film about retribution, cycles of violence, colonialism and dislocation. Wes Studi and Christian Bale have such emotive faces and some of the most successful and tense moments in this film wordlessly pass between them.

A simple story of two killers finding common ground.