It is always fascinating to see what kind of licensed and acquired content does well on Netflix. Sometimes it’s obvious picks, other times? You never would have guessed.
That’s the case with Old Henry, the new #1 movie on Netflix’s top 10 list. It’s a 2021 feature that has a 94% critic score and a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. This placement means Old Henry is now being broadcast to an audience of hundreds of millions, rather than the few that saw it at release (the movie made $77,463 worldwide as a small-scale independent film).
Whatever the case, word of mouth has spread, and it has even unseated Enola Holmes 3, the Netflix original sequel starring Millie Bobby Brown, which was years in the making (though that did stay at #1 for quite a while). But everyone loves a good Western, so what’s Old Henry about?
“Old Henry is an action-Western about a widowed farmer and his son who warily take in a mysterious, injured man with a satchel of cash. When a posse of men claiming to be the law come for the money, the farmer must decide whom to trust. Defending against a siege of his homestead, he reveals a talent for gunslinging that surprises everyone, calling his true identity into question.”
The film stars Tim Blake Nelson, whom you may know from other films such as O Brother, Where Art Thou, Lincoln, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and he even joined the MCU recently as The Leader in Captain America: Brave New World (we won’t blame him for the quality of that movie). Other names you could recognize in the film might be Trace Adkins and Stephen Dorff, but it’s a mostly unknown cast besides that. Old Henry was written and directed by Potsy Ponciroli, whose latest film is Motor City, starring Reacher’s Alan Ritchson, one of today’s most popular action stars. It’s actually just about to come out, released on July 24. So far it has decent reviews (a 70% score).
There simply aren’t that many mainstream Westerns anymore, at least not in movie form (Yellowstone sort of picked up that mantle on TV, though that’s set in the present day). Netflix has a collection of Westerns, but few are truly fantastic. Incidentally, it does have Nelson’s Ballad of Buster Scruggs available to watch. Other options include Slow West, American Primeval, Godless and The Harder They Fall, a mix of movies and shows. Few have these kinds of review scores, however, so you’ll certainly want to check out Old Henry.
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