Taylor Sheridan’s favourite movies of all time: “Incredibly profound to me”

Posted On November 26, 2025November 26, 2025

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Westerns are a big deal these days; men everywhere are practising growing out a moustache, considering buying a ten-gallon hat, whatever that is, and pretending they like the taste of whiskey while eating nothing but steak. Much of that is down to the success of modern-day TV series like Yellowstone and Landman, both of which were created by Taylor Sheridan. 

The latter show just returned for a second season, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Demi Moore and has underlined just how powerful Sheridan has become in the industry – he’s just signed a billion-dollar deal to move from Paramount to NBC Universal, where they’ll be hoping he can continue the kind of success he’s had with Yellowstone and the prequels 1883 and 1923. 

Although he’s obviously pretty adept at putting together oil industry dramas where everyone wears a cowboy hat and mutters a lot, Sheridan started off as an actor in network shows like Veronica Mars and FX’s gritty biker gang effort Sons of Anarchy before he turned scriptwriter, and proved pretty adept at that to say the least.

His first three films were all superb straight out of the gate, starting with 2015’s uber-tense Sicario, the FBI thriller directed by Denis Villeneuve about Mexican drug cartels, which was nominated for three Oscars and brought Sheridan a lot of attention, which he built upon with his second movie, the brilliant brother movie Hell or Highwater starring Chris Pine and Jeff Bridges. 

A contemporary Western, it told the tale of two siblings carrying out bank robberies in order to save their family ranch while being pursued by Bridges’ Texas Ranger and again led to Sheridan’s writing garnering widespread acclaim, this time earning an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Screenplay’. Then in 2017, Sheridan delivered the final instalment of what became known as his ‘Modern American Frontier trilogy’ with Wind River starring Elisabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner, a bleak murder mystery set on an Indian reservation in Wyoming. 

The West of America is evidently the overwhelming interest for Sheridan, and that was reflected in selecting his favourite films, with a classic from 1992 leading the way, starring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and possibly the most famous movie cowboy of all, Clint Eastwood. 

Sheridan told Rotten Tomatoes: “I would say Unforgiven is probably top of that list. What about it, is simply the way that Clint Eastwood demystified and destroyed our notion of a Western. I mean, demolished the genre; he turned it upside down. He just took a baseball bat to the genre, and it was just incredibly profound to me. Wildly entertaining. He did things in the storytelling that hadn’t been done in the way that they were done. Incredible.”

Elsewhere, Sheridan picked out multi-Oscar award-winning fare like The Godfather and Dustin Hoffman’s divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer from 1979, saying: “An incredibly simple plot that allows for really rich exploration of character, and one of the best screenplays I’ve ever read.”

He also selected Michael Mann’s conspiracy drama Inside Man from 1999, starring Al Pacino, explaining: “The Insider was one of the most influential films on me. The way that he can build tension with a movie about a court deposition. Just incredible.”

Plus, Sheridan reserved praise for Sidney Poitier’s In the Heat of the Night from 1967, stating: “Looking back now, I can see how influential it was on my screenwriting, because here you have what looks to be a crime procedural, and it’s actually a study in race and loneliness, and a perception of an era.”

Taylor Sheridan’s Five Favourite films:

• The Godfather (1972 – dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
• In the Heat of the Night (1967 – dir. Norman Jewison)
• Unforgiven (1992 – dir. Clint Eastwood)
• The Insider (1999 – dir. Michael Mann)
• Kramer vs Kramer (1979 – dir. Robert Benton)

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