6. Meek's Cutoff (2011)
What happens when a minimalist indie filmmaker with a penchant for no easy answers sets out to make a Western about life on the trail? Meek's Cutoff happens. Economic to the point that the film literally doesn't have an ending (the finale intentionally feels like the penultimate rather than climactic scene, and leaves many questions unanswered), Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff has more in common with existentialist Westerns of the 1960s, while still incorporating some 70s-style revisionism and modern indie naturalism. Like Monte Hellman's The Shooting, Meek's Cutoff is interested in pitting its characters against the endless landscape, seeing how long it is before they begin to seem insignificant in the frame. And there's a lot of that: no-one has walked as unrelentingly through a desert while saying nothing of real note since Matt Damon and Casey Affleck pretentioused their way through Gus van Sant's Gerry. But Meek's Cutoff is very different, special, a film that you'll feel getting under your skin from the moment the group of settlers ruthlessly discuss killing their guide for getting them lost.