11 Best Westerns on Netflix You Can Stream Tonight

Fifty years after its 1969 release, Sam Peckinpah’s gritty revisionist Western still takes you on one wild and violent ride. The year is 1913, and the lawless ways of the Old West are giving way to a new era. Aging outlaw Pike Bishop (William Holden) assembles his crew for one last robbery in a small town on the Texas-Mexico border. But when the heist turns violent, it soon becomes clear that someone set them up, sending those who survived the robbery on a blood-soaked race across the fading frontier.   

The Coen Brothers turned to Cormac McCarthy’s modern-day fable of fate and violence in the West Texas desert to craft this award-winning neo-Western—widely regarded as one of the Coens’ best films. Tommy Lee Jones plays Texas Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a bystander entwined in a drug deal gone awry, and Javier Bardem is the bolt gun-toting, Prince Valiant bob-sporting, assassin slash angel of death Anton Chigurh looming over them all.   

Quentin Tarantino wrangles an all-star cast of gunslingers for his ultraviolent 2015 Western set against the snowy expanse of post-Civil War Wyoming. Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) escorts fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to her execution in Red Rock, Wyoming, when they’re waylaid by a blizzard. They seek refuge in a stagecoach lodge, alongside six other strangers—each with a severely itchy trigger finger.  

Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen unleashes a wave of bloody vengeance in this independent Western from Danish filmmaker Kristian Levring. Mikkelsen plays Jon, a Danish homesteader on the American frontier who sets out to avenge the brutal murder of his wife and son by an outlaw gang.   

Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, and Gil Birmingham star in this gripping Western heist thriller set against the bleak backdrop of bankrupt, small-town America. Brothers Tanner (Foster) and Toby (Pine) join forces to rob different branches of the Texas bank that's threatening to foreclose on their family ranch. Bridges and Birmingham play the Texas Rangers in hot pursuit of the desperate brothers.   

Michael Fassbender, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Caren Pistorius star in this stylish and thoughtful Western. Smit-McPhee plays Jay Cavendish, a Scottish teen who enlists the help of a stoic gunslinger named Silas (Fassbender) to traverse the American frontier and reunite with his lost love Rose (Pistorius). But bounty hunters stalk the pair as they head west.   

Prefer the narrative expanse of a Western TV show? Check out Godless. Set in 1880s America, the series tracks Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels), a sadistic gang leader in search of his former protégé Roy Good (Jack O’Connell). Good’s trail leads Griffin to the town of La Belle, a New Mexico town inhabited nearly entirely by women after a mining accident wiped out its male residents.   

Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and Wes Studi star in this powerfully acted Western set in 1892. Bale plays Joseph J. Blocker, a U.S. Army Captain who after years of bloody fighting against the Cheyenne is tasked with escorting tribal leader Chief Yellow Hawk and his family to Cheyenne lands in Montana. Along the way, they cross paths with young widow Rosalie Quaid (Pike), whose family was murdered out on the plains. Together, they must endure the challenges and dangers of their arduous journey.   

Interested in a comical spin on the Western genre from the Coen Brothers? Take a gander at their dark and absurdist Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, starring everyone from Tim Blake Nelson and Zoe Kazan to Liam Neeson and Tom Waits. Keep in mind we’re still talking about the Coens here—so expect plenty of bloodshed alongside your cosmic hilarity.   

Taylor Sheridan breathed new life into the modern Western as the screenwriter of Hell or High Water and Sicario. In Wind River, Sheridan serves as both screenwriter and director to craft an icy neo-Western murder mystery. Elizabeth Olsen stars as FBI special agent Jane Banner, who partners up with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracker Corey Lambert (Jeremy Renner) to solve the murder of a young woman on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.   

Known as O Matador in its native Brazil, this striking international Western transports viewers from the 19th century American frontier to the desert badlands of early 20th century Brazil. The film follows Cabeliera (Diogo Morgado), an orphan raised in the wilderness by an outlaw named Seven Ears (Deto Montenegro). Now an adult, Cabeliera sets out to find Seven Ears—and transforms into a dangerous gunman himself.