All 9 Taylor Sheridan Movies, Ranked Worst to Best

Sicario is the best movie associated with Taylor Sheridan, but Hell or High Water may be his finest screenplay. That distinction matters in a ranking that includes films Sheridan wrote, directed, produced, or— in the case of F.A.S.T.—is scheduled to write and produce.

This list ranks eight released feature films and one announced project. The ranking considers critical and audience reception, Sheridan’s level of creative responsibility, the quality of the writing and direction, distinctiveness, influence, and the film’s lasting impact. Rotten Tomatoes figures are included as comparative snapshots, not as final judgments; they can change over time.

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1		Hell Or High Water [Blu-ray]	$10.46	Buy on Amazon
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4		Hell or High Water [Blu-ray] [2016]	$15.54	Buy on Amazon
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The nine Taylor Sheridan movies, ranked

Important scope note: This is not a list of only Taylor Sheridan-written films. Finestkind is included because he produced it, and Vile is included because he directed it. F.A.S.T. is included as an announced Warner Bros. feature, although it cannot fairly be judged as a completed movie yet.

#1 Best Overall

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1. Sicario (2015)

Sheridan’s role: Writer
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Rotten Tomatoes snapshot: 91% critics, 85% audience

Sicario is the strongest overall film in Sheridan’s movie career and the clearest expression of the ideas that would define his work: frontier violence, compromised institutions, masculine loyalty, and the uneasy question of who the law is really protecting.

The story follows FBI agent Kate Macer, played by Emily Blunt, as she joins a covert task force targeting cartel leadership along the U.S.-Mexico border. What begins as a conventional assignment gradually becomes an excursion into a world where official law enforcement, intelligence operations, and criminal violence overlap. Kate’s perspective gives the film a moral center, but the film repeatedly destabilizes that center. She is not simply learning how to defeat criminals; she is discovering that the institutions employing her may be operating by equally troubling rules.

What makes Sicario exceptional is the collaboration. Sheridan supplied a tense, morally unstable screenplay, but Denis Villeneuve’s direction gives it shape and momentum. Roger Deakins’ cinematography turns border crossings, desert landscapes, and night operations into spaces of dread. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score makes routine movement feel ominous, while the performances from Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin create three sharply different responses to institutional violence.

The film’s most powerful sequences are not merely action scenes. They are carefully controlled escalations in which the audience understands that the apparent mission is only one layer of a much larger operation. Sheridan’s script is interested in what violence does to people and institutions, while Villeneuve and the rest of the creative team make that violence tactile, spatial, and almost physically oppressive.

Sicario also established the borderland concerns that recur in Sheridan’s later films. Like Hell or High Water and Wind River, it uses a region at the edge of conventional power to examine who has access to justice and who is left outside it. These three films are sometimes grouped as a thematic “frontier trilogy,” but they are not a literal trilogy and do not share a continuing story.

Why it ranks first: It is not necessarily the Sheridan screenplay with the cleanest dialogue or most economical structure. It is the most complete cinematic achievement built from one of his scripts, and its direction, performances, sound, score, and images are inseparable from its impact.

For home viewing: Readers who want to revisit the highest-ranked released film can check the Sicario Blu-ray listing. Edition, stock, and format availability can change, so verify the exact release before purchasing.

2. Hell or High Water (2016)

Sheridan’s role: Writer
Director: David Mackenzie
Rotten Tomatoes snapshot: 97% critics, 89% audience

If Sicario is Sheridan’s best overall movie, Hell or High Water is arguably his best screenplay. It is more economical, more regionally specific, and more confident in the way it balances character, social criticism, and genre entertainment.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers Toby and Tanner Howard, who rob banks across West Texas in an attempt to save their family land from foreclosure. Jeff Bridges plays Marcus Hamilton, a Texas Ranger nearing retirement who pursues them with his longtime partner, Alberto Parker, played by Gil Birmingham.

The premise is immediately legible: two brothers commit a series of bank robberies, and two lawmen try to stop them. Sheridan’s writing makes the moral picture more complicated. Toby is not portrayed as a conventional criminal, and Tanner’s volatility is both a danger and a form of loyalty. The Rangers are not faceless obstacles, either. Marcus’s jokes, prejudices, professional instincts, and awareness of his own approaching irrelevance give the pursuit a human dimension.

The film’s social setting is as important as its plot. The banks are not abstract villains, but the economic system surrounding them has stripped the region of stability. Debt, land ownership, predatory financial practices, and generational obligation all shape the brothers’ decisions. Sheridan never turns the film into a speech about rural economic decline. Instead, those pressures appear in conversations, abandoned businesses, roadside encounters, and the characters’ practical calculations.

That restraint is one reason the screenplay works so well. The dialogue is sharp without making every character sound like a screenwriter. The film can move from a funny exchange to a threat or a gunfight without losing its sense of place. Its sympathy is distributed carefully: the audience can understand why Toby acts without being asked to approve of every choice he makes.

Rank #2

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David Mackenzie’s direction and the performances complete the material. Pine gives Toby a controlled sadness, Foster makes Tanner both frightening and oddly endearing, and Bridges turns Marcus into more than a familiar grizzled-lawman figure. The film received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and Sheridan was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

Why it ranks second: It may be the most accomplished piece of writing in Sheridan’s filmography. It ranks just below Sicario only because Sicario achieves a more distinctive and immersive cinematic experience through the combined force of its direction, imagery, sound, and score. Swapping these two at the top is entirely defensible.

For collectors: Lionsgate has made the film available in 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital formats. A suitable starting point for a physical copy is the Hell or High Water 4K Blu-ray listing, with the specific edition checked before purchase.

3. Wind River (2017)

Sheridan’s role: Writer and director
Rotten Tomatoes snapshot: 87% critics, 90% audience

Wind River is the most important film for understanding Sheridan as a director. The screenplay is recognizably his, but the film’s frozen landscapes, controlled pacing, and emotional severity show what happens when he is responsible for both the words and the images.

Jeremy Renner plays Cory Lambert, a wildlife officer who discovers the body of an 18-year-old woman on a snowy Wyoming reservation. Elizabeth Olsen plays Jane Banner, an FBI agent sent to investigate. The two form an uneasy partnership as they work through a case shaped by extreme weather, geographical isolation, personal grief, and the institutional neglect experienced by Native communities.

The setting is not decorative. Snow, wind, distance, and altitude determine what the characters can see, how quickly they can move, and how easily a crime can disappear. Sheridan uses the landscape as both evidence and threat. The reservation is not simply a remote backdrop for a murder mystery; it is a community dealing with limited resources and a justice system that often arrives late or not at all.

Renner gives Cory a restrained performance built around unresolved grief. His knowledge of the land is practical, but it is also connected to his own loss. Olsen’s Jane is less experienced and less physically adapted to the environment, yet her outsider status allows her to recognize institutional failures that local authorities have been forced to endure as normal.

The film’s central concerns connect it to Sicario and Hell or High Water: violence takes place in a borderland, official systems are incomplete or compromised, and ordinary people are left to navigate consequences created by larger institutions. But Wind River is also the most intimate of the three.

Its weaknesses are serious but do not erase its achievement. The treatment of sexual violence can feel blunt, and the climactic flashback has been criticized as a structurally convenient way to supply information. The film sometimes states its themes more directly than Sicario or Hell or High Water would. Even so, its sense of place, performances, and emotional force make it one of Sheridan’s essential movies.

Why it ranks third: It is Sheridan’s strongest writer-director film and perhaps his most personal-feeling movie. It falls just short of the top two because its structure and handling of certain material are less precise than the best parts of Sicario and Hell or High Water.

For repeat viewing: The film’s atmosphere benefits from a home-cinema presentation, particularly for viewers interested in its cinematography and sound design. The Wind River Blu-ray is a reasonable physical-media search starting point; confirm the edition and availability at purchase.

4. Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

Sheridan’s role: Writer, director, and producer
Source material: Michael Koryta’s novel and earlier screenplay material
Rotten Tomatoes snapshot: 63% critics, 86% audience

Those Who Wish Me Dead is a compact survival thriller set against a Montana wildfire. Angelina Jolie plays Hannah Faber, a smoke jumper whose confidence has been damaged by a failed rescue. After encountering a terrified boy named Connor, Hannah becomes responsible for protecting him from assassins while a fire spreads across the wilderness.

The film works best when it treats the environment as an active danger. Fire, smoke, wind, falling trees, and rough terrain constantly change the characters’ options. Sheridan understands how to stage physical jeopardy clearly: the audience generally knows where the danger is, what the characters need to do, and why a seemingly simple escape route may not work.

Jolie brings commitment and physical authority to Hannah, while the Montana setting supplies the film with a strong survival-thriller atmosphere. The pursuit also benefits from its compact scale. This is not an elaborate conspiracy epic; it is a small group of people moving through an increasingly hostile landscape.

Rank #3

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The limitations are mostly in the screenplay. The assassins, the threatened child, the damaged rescuer, and the protective mentor all belong to familiar thriller archetypes. Sentimental beats sometimes arrive with more force than the character development has earned. The movie is effective at movement and danger, but less layered in its moral and psychological architecture than Sheridan’s strongest work.

Why it ranks fourth: It demonstrates that Sheridan can direct a conventional action thriller with confidence, and its audience response has been notably stronger than its critics’ score. But it lacks the social texture, dialogue, and ambiguity that make his best films endure.

5. Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

Sheridan’s role: Writer
Director: Stefano Sollima
Rotten Tomatoes snapshot: 62% critics, 66% audience

Sicario: Day of the Soldado returns to the cartel-war world of the first film but shifts its emphasis. Instead of following an idealistic FBI agent into a covert operation, the sequel focuses more directly on Matt Graver, played by Josh Brolin, and Alejandro Gillick, played by Benicio del Toro, as they operate in an increasingly militarized and morally unrestrained conflict.

The sequel retains Sheridan’s interest in institutions that use unofficial violence while maintaining an official appearance. Cartel networks, government agencies, border crossings, and political calculations all remain entangled. The film is especially interested in how authorities manufacture instability and then use that instability to justify escalation.

Brolin and del Toro remain compelling screen presences. Their relationship gives the film a hard, watchful intensity, and the action set pieces are muscular and often brutally efficient. The movie also preserves the bleak geopolitical atmosphere that made the original distinctive.

But escalation is not the same as development. Soldado is broader, louder, and more overtly militarized than Sicario, and that expansion sometimes replaces the original’s precision. The first film built dread through uncertainty and perspective; the sequel more often presents its brutality as the operating language of the world.

Why it ranks fifth: It is a solid, forceful genre sequel with strong performances and memorable action, but it does not reproduce the first film’s combination of ambiguity, visual control, sustained tension, and thematic concentration.

6. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse (2021)

Sheridan’s role: Screenwriter
Based on: Tom Clancy’s novel

Rotten Tomatoes snapshot: 45% critics, 41% audience

Led by Michael B. Jordan, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is a military revenge thriller designed to establish a larger franchise around John Clark, one of Tom Clancy’s recurring characters. Sheridan’s involvement is as screenwriter rather than creator of an original story.

The movie has an efficient revenge premise and recognizable genre propulsion. Jordan gives the central character physical intensity and makes the film easy to follow even as its military and intelligence plot expands. The action is built around a clear emotional objective: a soldier seeks answers and retribution after a personal loss.

The problem is that the film feels more like a franchise-launch mechanism than a fully distinctive Sheridan moral drama. Its plotting follows familiar military-action patterns, and its institutional conflicts rarely achieve the layered ambiguity found in Sicario. The regional identity, sharply observed dialogue, and complicated social pressures of Hell or High Water are largely absent.

Rank #4

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Why it ranks sixth: It is a functional star vehicle with competent action construction, but its formula and franchise obligations leave limited room for Sheridan’s most recognizable strengths.

7. Finestkind (2023)

Sheridan’s role: Producer only
Writer and director: Brian Helgeland
Rotten Tomatoes snapshot: 27% critics, 58% audience

Do not describe Finestkind as a Taylor Sheridan-written or Taylor Sheridan-directed movie. Its inclusion here reflects the broader scope of this list: Sheridan produced the film, while Brian Helgeland wrote and directed it.

The crime drama follows Massachusetts fishing-industry brothers whose financial problems draw them into organized crime. The cast includes Ben Foster, Toby Wallace, Jenna Ortega, and Tommy Lee Jones. Its setting gives the film a potentially strong foundation: a working waterfront under economic pressure, family bonds strained by money, and criminal choices presented as extensions of practical survival.

There are recognizable ingredients here for viewers familiar with Sheridan’s work, including regional identity, damaged families, economic desperation, and a descent into organized violence. But those thematic similarities should not be mistaken for authorship. The movie belongs primarily to Helgeland’s writing and direction, and Sheridan’s producing credit does not justify attributing its individual dialogue, structure, or visual decisions to him.

The reception has also been comparatively weak. The available Rotten Tomatoes snapshot lists a 27% critics score and a 58% audience score. The film has a credible cast and an intelligible premise, but its characterization and dramatic construction do not reach the level of Sheridan’s central filmography.

Why it ranks seventh: It is one of the weaker-received released films connected to Sheridan, and his producer-level involvement makes direct comparison with his writer-led movies inherently limited.

8. Vile (2011)

Sheridan’s role: Director

Vile is historically significant because it was Sheridan’s first feature directing credit, but it is also a major outlier. The low-budget horror film traps a group of people and forces them into acts of torture in order to survive.

The premise places several concerns that would recur in Sheridan’s later work—coercion, violence, moral pressure, and group behavior under extreme conditions—into a much more direct exploitation-horror framework. It is possible to see an early interest in how people behave when social rules collapse and survival becomes the only apparent objective.

As a finished film, however, Vile is substantially less accomplished than Sheridan’s later crime, survival, and frontier dramas. Limited production resources, uneven characterization, and a derivative torture-horror setup restrict what the movie can do. The film is better understood as a formative experiment than as a representative example of the voice that later emerged in Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River.

Sheridan’s later comments about the project have also framed it as a learning experience. That makes Vile useful for tracing his development, even if it is not the film to show someone who wants to understand why his screenwriting became influential.

Why it ranks eighth among released films: Its place in the chronology matters more than its place in the quality hierarchy. It shows where Sheridan started as a director, not where his mature strengths were fully formed.

9. F.A.S.T. — scheduled for May 14, 2027

Status: Unreleased
Sheridan’s role: Writer and producer
Director: Ben Richardson

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F.A.S.T. is placed last only because an unreleased film cannot honestly be ranked by finished-film quality. This is a publishing convention, not a prediction that it will be Sheridan’s worst movie.

The announced Warner Bros. action thriller centers on a former special-forces commando recruited by the DEA to lead an operation against drug dealers protected by the CIA. Brandon Sklenar, LaKeith Stanfield, Jason Clarke, Sam Claflin, and Trevante Rhodes are among the announced cast, with Ben Richardson directing.

The premise returns Sheridan to action-and-crime territory associated with Sicario and Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. The distinction is that he is working as writer and producer rather than director. That means the finished film will also depend substantially on Richardson’s direction, the eventual edit, the performances, and the production’s final creative choices.

The announced U.S. release date is May 14, 2027, but scheduled dates can change. Until the film is released and reviewed, there is no responsible basis for calling it a success, disappointment, or even a likely continuation of Sheridan’s best work.

Why it ranks ninth: It has no quality ranking yet. It belongs at the bottom only to keep the announced project within a worst-to-best list without pretending that an unseen movie can be evaluated.

What the ranking says about Taylor Sheridan’s movie career

Sheridan’s film career is best understood as a movement from an experimental early directing credit toward a distinctive screenwriting voice concerned with American spaces where institutions are weak, contested, or selectively enforced.

His recurring subjects include:

• Frontier spaces: the U.S.-Mexico border in Sicario, economically distressed Texas in Hell or High Water, and a remote Wyoming reservation in Wind River.
• Compromised institutions: law enforcement, intelligence agencies, banks, military structures, and government systems frequently protect some people while abandoning others.
• Masculine loyalty: Sheridan’s male characters often express love, grief, or duty through action rather than open vulnerability.
• Economic pressure: debt, land loss, limited employment, and regional decline drive characters toward choices that are illegal but emotionally understandable.
• Violence as social language: Violence in these films is rarely just spectacle. It is a tool used by institutions, families, criminals, and individuals to enforce power or respond to helplessness.

The high point is the 2015–2017 run of Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River. They are not connected by plot, but they form a useful thematic grouping. Each places characters in an American borderland or rural margin and asks who receives protection from the law, who is permitted to define justice, and what happens when legitimate systems fail.

Best starting point depending on what you want

For viewers moving from the movies to television: Yellowstone is not one of these nine films, but readers who want to explore Sheridan’s related television work can look for the Yellowstone Season 1 Blu-ray. Check regional availability and the exact edition before buying.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is F.A.S.T. actually ranked as a movie?

Not in the usual critical sense. F.A.S.T. is unreleased and is scheduled for a U.S. release on May 14, 2027. It appears at number nine only because the list includes Sheridan’s announced feature credits. Its position does not predict its quality.

Did Taylor Sheridan write or direct Finestkind?

No. Sheridan is credited as a producer. Brian Helgeland wrote and directed Finestkind. It should not be presented as a Taylor Sheridan-written or Taylor Sheridan-directed film.

Are Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River a trilogy?

They are sometimes described as a thematic “frontier trilogy,” but they are not a literal continuing-story trilogy. The films share concerns about borderlands, institutional failure, violence, and people living beyond the protection of conventional power.

What is Taylor Sheridan’s best movie?

Sicario is the best overall film associated with Sheridan. Hell or High Water is a reasonable alternative if the ranking emphasizes screenplay quality, while Wind River is the strongest example of Sheridan writing and directing the same film.

The Bottom Line

The essential Sheridan movie run is Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River. Start with Sicario for the most powerful complete film, choose Hell or High Water for the sharpest screenplay, and watch Wind River to see Sheridan’s voice translated most directly into his own direction. The remaining titles are useful for tracing his development and range, but their credits—and therefore the degree of Sheridan authorship—are not interchangeable.

Quick Recap

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Bestseller No. 2

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Bestseller No. 3

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Bestseller No. 4

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