Taylor Sheridan is a Hollywood heavyweight who’s arguably best known for the vast universe of TV shows he’s created. Those series, almost all of which are exclusive to Paramount+, include dramas like “Landman” and “Tulsa King” — shows that tend to heavily center the idea of rugged individualism, American masculinity, power, family legacy, and the importance of land. At the same time, though, Sheridan is also more than just a TV hitmaker.
His films (like “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water”) don’t necessarily drive the same kind of pop culture chatter that his sprawling TV dramas do, but they still have a way of showcasing his gift for blending genre thrills with meditations on violence, place, and moral ambiguity. And one of those movies, in fact, is currently dominating Netflix’s Top 10 movies chart — eight years after it first hit cinemas.
It’s 2017’s “Wind River,” written and directed by Sheridan and starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner, and it’s typical Sheridan. Set on a Native American reservation in Wyoming, the film is a crime procedural blended with a frontier survival tale, built around themes of justice, loss, and the quiet resilience of people living at the edge of America.
Wind River gets a second life on Netflix
The movie is currently the #3 film on Netflix, based on the Top 10 movies chart found inside the app itself (the only movies beating it, at least right now, are “KPop Demon Hunters” at #2, and “Unknown Number,” a documentary about a catfish scandal, at #1).
This movie is also not the only time Sheridan has worked with Renner, either. The latter also stars in Sheridan’s Paramount+ drama “Mayor of Kingstown,” a crime show about a fictional town in Michigan where the prison industry is the main source of employment. As for “Wind River,” it follows a wildlife tracker played by Renner who links up with an FBI agent (Olsen) to probe the killing of a young woman who lived on a Wyoming reservation. Their search for the killer delves into the neglect faced by Indigenous communities, as well as the harshness of life spent on the frontier.
There’s a pretty harrowing gun battle about halfway or so into the movie that left me on the edge of my seat when I watched it on the big screen. Sheridan’s storytelling, at least in my opinion, tends to be better when he can spread it over multiple episodes of a TV show. That said, in “Wind River,” at least, he’s in particularly fine form.
“Wind River lures viewers into a character-driven mystery with smart writing, a strong cast, and a skillfully rendered setting that delivers the bitter chill promised by its title,” reads the critics’ consensus summary on Rotten Tomatoes. There, the movie has an 87% critics’ score, based on 250 reviews, and a 90% audience score (based on more than 25,000 user ratings).
