This Overlooked Neo-Western With 84% On RT Is Perfect For Taylor Sheridan Fans

Published Aug 17, 2026, 7:37 AM EDT Senior Music Editor at Screen Rant, Sarah's love of sound and story drive the beat. A globetrotting brand whisperer and award-winning journalist, she’s built cross-cultural narratives around the world—but music has always been her true north. She launched DJ Mag North America, successfully introducing the iconic UK brand to the U.S. market. Previously, she carved a space for EDM inside the pages of VIBE, blending electronic and hip-hop culture long before it was trendy. Taylor Sheridan has become so closely associated with the modern Western that it can sometimes feel like he invented the genre himself. Yellowstone turned the contemporary ranch drama into a television phenomenon, while movies like Hell or High Water and Wind River proved how well his bleak vision of the American frontier could work on the big screen. Yet some of the best movies for Sheridan fans were made before the Dutton family ever arrived on television. One particularly overlooked neo-Western from the mid-2000s has nearly everything that makes Sheridan's strongest work so compelling. The landscape is vast but oppressive, violence has consequences, and the people living along the Texas-Mexico border have complicated relationships with the law supposedly protecting them. Its central story begins with a killing, but the movie is far less interested in solving a conventional mystery than it is in what one man believes he owes the dead. That combination makes it an especially good recommendation for viewers who loved the dusty desperation of Hell or High Water or the moral unease running through Sicario. The movie boasts an impressive 84% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, yet it rarely receives the same attention as the neo-Westerns that followed it. The film is The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones' 2005 directorial debut. Jones also stars alongside Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, and Melissa Leo. Written by acclaimed Amores Perros and Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, the film won Jones Best Actor and Arriaga Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival. More importantly for Taylor Sheridan fans, Three Burials feels remarkably close to the kind of modern frontier story he would soon help bring back into the mainstream. Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Is A Taylor Sheridan-Like Western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada begins with the death of Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), a Mexican ranch hand and close friend of Pete Perkins (Jones). Border Patrol agent Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) is responsible, but there is little appetite among the local authorities to pursue justice. Pete eventually kidnaps Norton, forces him to dig up Melquiades' body, and sets off on horseback toward Mexico to fulfill a promise to bury his friend in his hometown. It sounds like the setup for a straightforward revenge movie, but Three Burials becomes something stranger and more affecting. Like many of the most suspenseful Western movies ever, much of its tension comes from knowing that violence is inevitable without knowing exactly what form it will take. That is where the Sheridan comparison really lands. His best Western stories are fascinated by places where official systems have either failed or become irrelevant, leaving ordinary people to make impossible moral decisions themselves. Three Burials operates in that same uncomfortable territory. There are no easy heroes or cartoonish villains, and Pete's attempt to honor his friend gradually creates its own trail of suffering. The Texas-Mexico border setting also feels essential rather than decorative. Chris Menges' cinematography gives the movie enormous visual scale without romanticizing the landscape, while Jones delivers one of his most restrained performances. Two decades later, Three Burials feels almost like a missing link between the classic Western tradition and the neo-Western revival Sheridan later helped push into the mainstream. Even beloved movies like Tombstone can be harder to watch today through a modern lens, while Three Burials was already interrogating the mythology of the frontier rather than simply celebrating it. Taylor Sheridan Needs To Make More Neo-Western Movies, Not Just TV Shows Sheridan may now be synonymous with television thanks to the enormous success of Yellowstone and its expanding universe, but some of his strongest work remains on the big screen. Before he became one of television's most prolific creators, Sheridan wrote an informal trilogy of modern frontier movies that established nearly everything audiences now associate with his storytelling. Hell or High Water and Wind River are still some of his best work. Along with Sicario, the movies showed how effectively Sheridan could take familiar Western archetypes and transplant them into contemporary America. Hell or High Water (2016): Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers robbing banks across West Texas while a Texas Ranger played by Jeff Bridges closes in on them. Sheridan replaces outlaw gangs and cattle barons with mortgages, foreclosures, and dying small towns. The brothers are unquestionably criminals, but the circumstances driving them make the moral equation much harder than simply deciding who is right and who is wrong. Wind River (2017): Sheridan moved into the director's chair for this murder mystery set on Wyoming's Wind River reservation. Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen lead the investigation into the death of a young woman, but the mystery is only part of what makes the movie so devastating. Like Three Burials, it is ultimately a story about grief, isolation, and people living in places the rest of the country has learned to overlook. Both films benefit enormously from the limitations of the feature format. There is no room for endless feuds or subplots that need to survive into another season. Every decision pushes the characters closer to an unavoidable confrontation, and Sheridan's writing feels especially sharp when his characters have only two hours to discover exactly how far they are willing to go. That doesn't diminish what he has accomplished on television. Yellowstone became a genuine cultural phenomenon, creating characters whose appeal has continued well beyond the original series—including Beth Dutton, whose relationship with the Dutton Ranch reveals far more about her than her famous one-liners. Sheridan has built a television empire few filmmakers ever manage to replicate. Until he does, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a remarkably good substitute. It has the violence, moral ambiguity, lonely landscapes, and difficult questions Sheridan fans expect, but it got there years before the Duttons ever rode onto television. Release Date November 17, 2005 Runtime 121 minutes Director Tommy Lee Jones Writers Guillermo Arriaga Producers Luc Besson, Michael Fitzgerald Cast Dwight Yoakam Sheriff Frank Belmont January Jones Lou Ann Norton