10 Awesome Movies From 2017 You Probably Missed
7. Wind River
Taylor Sheridan was already one of the hottest screenwriting talents in Hollywood before Wind River landed, a film that marks his debut as a writer and director.
Sheridan, best known for writing the brilliant films Sicario and Hell and High Water, works wonders here with this tight mystery movie starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen. As a US Fish and Wildlife Service agent and an FBI agent, Renner and Olsen team up in an attempt to discover why a beautiful young women is found dead in the snow, raped, with no shoes on.
There are a few familiar elements driving Wind River, but Sheridan keeps the momentum going at such a pace - not to mention Renner and Olsen's great chemistry - that you won't care. The atmosphere here is key to the film's power: it has the strange allure of a movie like Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, mixing elements of Coen brothers noir (think Fargo) and the classic western.
The result is a film that is by turns disturbing, violent, and thrilling, especially as the screenplay makes sudden, unexpected turns (the best of which takes us right into the past, shedding an unexpected light on the central mystery). Wind River should also be admired for its attempts to shed light on true life cases of missing Native American women, which inspired Sheridan to pen the movie.