A small-time cattleman and his crew run afoul of a wealthy land owner intent on their destruction.

An elegiac film about a vanishing way of life, Kevin Costner’s Open Range is the most old-fashioned, emotionally honest Western anyone has dared to make in at least thirty years, maybe longer. Not even Costner’s own Dances with Wolves (1990), which seemed to prove that a worn-out mythology of the West could perform new tricks, showed this much bald respect for a genre which long ago had its day in the sun. In our era of pervasively unearned irony and myopic self-reference, the fact Costner even wanted to make this film, nevermind convincing others to follow him, makes Open Range one of the most daring movies anyone will attempt in 2003, a Quixotic gesture defying the gods of demography. (more…)