Watch the best Western movie of the year right now

Featuring an Oscar-winner, the film has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score.

The Weight, a fantastic new Western crime thriller, is available to watch in cinemas now.

No stranger to the Western genre, thanks to In a Valley of Violence, The Kid, and The Magnificent Seven, the movie stars Oscar-nominee Ethan Hawke. He plays Samuel, a mechanic and WWI veteran living in 1930s America who has fallen on hard times.

Movie Title	The Weight
Where to Watch	In Cinemas
Cast	Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio, Avi Nash, Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen, George Burgess, Cameron Brady, Avy Berry, Alec Newman, Sam Hazeldine
Length	113 minutes

After he and his young daughter Penny (Avy Berry) are evicted from their apartment, Samuel is provoked into a fight by plainclothes policemen. He is subsequently separated from Penny, arrested and sent to prison, before later being assigned to a convict labour camp to clear roads.

Samuel impresses the camp's warden, Clancy (Oscar-winner Russell Crowe), with his engineering knowledge. This leads Clancy to offer him and two other prisoners (including Austin Amelio and Avi Nash) a chance for early release.

All they have to do is secretly transport bags of gold bricks across the Oregon wilderness. Between the weight of the gold, the difficult terrain, in-fighting amidst the group, and marauders lurking in the woods (one of whom is played by Irish actor Cameron Brady, in a scene-stealing turn), this proves easier said than done.

Watch the trailer for The Weight right here:

The Weight never quite escapes the shadow of the similar-in-plot classics Sorcerer (1977) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). That said, director Padraic McKinley (whose work on this got him the job helming Sicario 3) and writers Matthew Booi (Death Trench) and Shelby Gaines (Wildcat) conjure similarly hard-bitten, likeable characters (including Julia Jones as a runaway who accompanies Samuel and co on the journey) and nerve-wracking, tense thrills.

In particular, there is an extended early sequence of the prisoners transporting heavy gold bars across an incredibly rickety mountain bridge that will have you white-knuckling your armrest.

McKinley and his writers also set the story in a different, fascinating, gorgeous setting: the United States during the Great Depression. Wanting more control over the country's money supply, President Franklin D. Roosevelt during this time issued an order requiring U.S. citizens to turn over their gold to the government, real-life history that inspires Clancy's plan.

The cast is universally excellent, even if Hawke's the standout. Though Samuel is strong and silent, the actor also finds a way of communicating his great intelligence and vulnerability.

Crowe may not have as much screen time as The Weight's poster suggests, with Clancy essentially bookending the story. Yet, the scenes he shares with Hawke, as their characters try to suss each other out, are absolutely electric.

A new spin on a classic formula, The Weight is easily the best Western of the year and one of the best thrillers too.