Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016)

Two brothers, one a repentant divorcee and the other a reckless ex-con, go on a spree of sloppy bank heists in dead-end Texas towns to pay off the younger one's debts, and end up being pursued by a pair of bickering Texas Rangers, one on the brink of retirement. There is lots of dust, manly cussing and blood on the horizon. So far so standard, but Hell or High Water rises well above the genre norm through a combination of factors: it doggedly takes as much time as it needs to build up social context and atmosphere, more interested in people sitting on porches mulling over the vanishing of the myth of the American dream than shoot-outs. The casting, led by stalwart Jeff Bridges as the lead ranger, is uniformly solid and they are all given meaty, sardonic dialogue to work with, and then there's the wide drawn-out shots of the parched landscape to suck you further into the ambience. As noir elegiac odes to something that never really was go, they don't come much more perfectly realised. Think of it as a No Country for Anyone.

7/10