Slow West, 2015, John Maclean

"And yet, just as your attention starts to wander, “Slow West” pulls it up short. The director is John Maclean, making his début, and, if he demonstrates how hard it is to handle whimsy, he more than atones for it with two tremendous set pieces [...]

It as is though, late in the day, at the close of a lightweight tale, Maclean were seeking to fulfill the basic duty of a period drama, by reminding us: this is how it was, in this place, in that small span of history. Lives didn’t weigh so much, back then, so why not take a moment to honor them now? As the anthropologist says, “In a short time, this will be a long time ago.”