Movies Like Unforgiven: 12 Westerns Where Violence Has a Cost

Sam Peckinpah's film about aging outlaws who have outlived their own era is the wound Unforgiven presses on. These are men who are good at one terrible thing and the world no longer has a place for it. The violence is not thrilling, it is a horror, filmed so you feel every body fall.

If Unforgiven's idea that a killer is just a tired man with a debt spoke to you, this is where that idea was carved into the western.

Robert Altman's anti western is muddy, cold, and heartbreaking, the opposite of every clean frontier myth. Warren Beatty is a small time gambler who talks a bigger game than he can back, and the film watches the West grind him down. Roger Ebert called it a perfect film. Watch it for the snow and the Leonard Cohen songs and the feeling that nobody here is a legend, just people in the mud.

This is the closest film in spirit to Unforgiven, and one of the most beautiful ever shot. It is about the myth of the gunfighter and the sad, envious man who kills him to become famous. Roger Deakins photographs it like a memory that is already fading.

It is slow on purpose. Give it the patience it wants and it will break your heart over how legends are really made and unmade.

The deep cut. Peckinpah's early elegy pairs Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea as two old lawmen at the end of the trail, arguing about whether a man's word still means anything. It is quiet, gentle, and quietly devastating. If you want the tender side of Unforgiven, two aging men reckoning with who they were, start here. Most people have never seen it. They should.

John Ford and John Wayne made the western that Unforgiven is arguing with. Wayne's Ethan is a hero the film refuses to clean up, a man eaten alive by hate. The famous last shot, the door closing on a man who has no home to come into, is the whole genre's conscience in one frame. You have to see it to see what Eastwood was answering.

Sergio Leone's slow, operatic masterpiece is about the West dying and the railroad and money killing it. Henry Fonda, cast against everything, plays pure evil. Every scene takes its time on purpose. If Unforgiven's elegy for a whole vanishing world moved you, this is that elegy at its grandest, set to the greatest western score ever written.

Gary Cooper is a marshal abandoned by the town he protected, waiting alone for the men coming to kill him. It plays out almost in real time and it is really about courage and cowardice and what a community owes the person who does its violence for it. Lean, tense, and morally serious in the way Unforgiven is.

Another deep cut, this one from Australia, written by Nick Cave. It is a brutal, sun scorched western about a man forced to hunt down his own brother. The land is hell and the violence has real weight and real grief. If you can take how hard Unforgiven looks at cruelty, this looks just as hard and rarely blinks.

Jim Jarmusch's black and white western is strange and dreamlike, with Johnny Depp as a mild accountant who becomes an accidental killer drifting toward death. Neil Young's guitar drones over all of it. It is a poem more than a plot. A deep cut for the adventurous, and it shares Unforgiven's sense that a man who has killed is already halfway a ghost.

The Coen brothers made a modern western, but it is a western to its bones, and it is Unforgiven's grandchild in how it treats violence. There is no glory in it, only consequence and dread and an old lawman who no longer understands the world's cruelty. Tommy Lee Jones closing the film on a remembered dream is pure Unforgiven melancholy.

Kevin Costner's underrated western is patient and old fashioned in the best way, about two free range cattlemen pushed into a fight they did not want. When the gunfight finally comes, Costner films it as clumsy, terrifying, and real, the way Unforgiven insists a real gunfight would be. A quiet film that respects its audience.

David Mackenzie and writer Taylor Sheridan set their western in modern Texas, with two brothers robbing the bank that is robbing their family. It is about desperation, brotherhood, and a dying way of life, and Jeff Bridges plays the old lawman one last ride from retirement. Proof the western still has this exact ache in it.

This week's pick, in case you have not seen it yet, or want to sit with it again before Friday. Clint Eastwood spent his whole career as the myth and then made the film that tells the truth about it. William Munny is not a legend, he is a killer trying to stay retired, and the film makes you feel every death he causes. It won Best Picture for a reason. If any of the films above call to you, they all lead back here.