Chris Pine and Ben Foster are bank-robbing brothers pursued by Jeff Bridges’s Texas ranger in British director David Mackenzie’s (Starred Up) bracingly smart and darkly funny foray into classic Americana.

Amidst the sun-roasted and deceptively sleepy West Texas plains, two outlaw brothers - Toby (Chris Pine), a conscientious divorced father and Tanner (Ben Foster), an unrepentant ex con - embark on a spree of bank robberies. With their farm threatened with foreclosure they need to raise funds in order to keep their home out of the bank's hands. They might get away with it too... that is unless Marcus (Jeff Bridges), a racially insensitive Texas ranger on the verge of retirement and his Comanche-Mexican deputy Alberto (Gil Birmingham) don’t catch up with them. Which may hinge on whether they can put up with each other, as they trade barbs amongst grisly motel rooms and long stake outs, whilst trying to figure out just where exactly the brothers will hit next.

With a searing, quotable script by screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) and an evocative score courtesy of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, this is thrillingly gripping stuff. Like a 21st-century Robin Hood story, Mackenzie delivers a muscular heist movie with a social conscience and a wittily satirical bent, that as well as having high tension and terrific performances all round, also has something both serious and sad to say about contemporary profit-before-people politics.

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