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Thom Zimny and Bruce Springsteen ’s “Western Stars” is a lovely companion piece to the latest album from the legendary musician, a gorgeous, introspective journey into the very concept of the American conscience. As Springsteen lays out in the introduction, life is often a push-and-pull between the concept of the individual and the need for community. We desire self-expression and individuality, but we also long for family, friends, and togetherness. How do these two things express themselves across our lives in art, love, religion, and even the many mistakes we make over the course of a lifetime? These are the deep themes in Springsteen’s album that are enhanced through this excellent film, one that captures the duality of its creator and its concept in ways that few album companion pieces have before.

The structure of “Western Stars” is simple and effective. The Boss recently told Indiewire that his landmark album Nebraska was heavily influenced by Terrence Malick ’s “ Badlands ,” and one can see how that influence carries all the way to “Western Stars” in its meditative, poetic style, one that’s deeply entranced by open spaces and the beauty of nature. We hear no one else’s voice but Springsteen’s in “Western Stars,” as he alternates voiceover passages that serve as introductions to his songs with live performances from an amazing, intimate show in the loft of a barn he owns. As he says at the beginning, it’s a sacred space, one that reflects the history it’s seen in its deep wood and high ceilings.

Keeping with the Malick style, Springsteen’s introductions are not your standard songwriter banter. He’s digging deeper here than he has publicly before, looking at how the characters he’s created for these songs represent both something greater about the human condition and his own past. When he sings on “Stones” with his wife Patti Scialfa, “Those were only the lies you’ve told me,” it feels both like a confessional and a character. Like a lot of great writers of any medium, Springsteen finds a way to reveal something about himself and us through the characters he portrays musically. Western Stars is full of songs in which he plays a “role” such as an aging genre star on the title track or a stuntman on “Drive Fast” but what makes the album a masterpiece is how much these characters reveal about other people, especially their creator. And what makes the film special is how much Springsteen is willing to reveal about this aspect of the album, commenting on the many mistakes he’s made in his life—at one point, he even claims that he hurt pretty much everyone he’s ever loved—and how even when he takes on these characters, he’s telling us something about himself.

Most of what draws people to “Western Stars” will be the music, and this movie is a stunner purely as a concert film. Springsteen somehow squeezes an entire ensemble into that hay loft, and one can hear the strings and backup singers bouncing off the high wood ceilings. However, it all comes back to Bruce. I liked “Western Stars” the best when it felt the most intimate, keeping us in tight focus on Springsteen’s face, as he reveals a depth to his voice that feels more resonant than ever before. It’s something that comes with age, and while Bruce looks nowhere near his age of 70, there’s an experience that comes through in his tone that’s mesmerizing. He’s looking back at a long life, well-lived, and revealing so much about himself through these songs. Melancholy, contemplative tracks like “There Goes My Miracle” and “Sundown” are ones that a younger Springsteen couldn’t have made connect like the 2019 version does. It’s not quite as drastic as Bob Dylan singing “It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there,” on 1997’s masterful Time Out of Mind , but it reminds me of that confessional work in the way it captures an artist in a different phase of his life.

"Western Stars" the movie enhances and reflects on the album's themes in unexpectedly moving ways. It would be incredibly easy to capture Springsteen’s energy in a concert film and we will see many tributes to his life and career in documentary form in years to come, but this work is focused, lyrical, and personal in ways that accompany the album instead of just trying to market or recreate it. The film makes one of the best works of Springsteen’s career even better. Heck, I’m pretty sure Terrence Malick would like it too.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Western Stars (2019)

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Film Review: ‘Western Stars’

Bruce Springsteen's rapturous concert film, which he co-directed, finds the 69-year-old star just contented enough to look his demons in the eye.

By Owen Gleiberman

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There’s a moment in “ Western Stars ,” the rapturous new Bruce Springsteen concert film that’s also a meditation on all things Bruce, when Springsteen lifts you up and carries you off in that way that only he can do. Most of the movie was shot in the 140-year-old cavernous dark barn that sits on Springsteen’s property in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Over several nights, he performed all 13 tracks off his latest studio album, “Western Stars” (released this past June), in front of a small private audience. The songs, composed in a glowing style of ’70s Southern California country pop, are what you might call happy portraits of heartbreak, and one of them, “There Goes My Miracle,” soars to a gorgeous cresting height of confessional melancholy.

It’s Bruce singing about a love — a miracle — that was lost (“There goes my miracle, walking away, walking away…” ), and what’s implicit is that the singer knows it was his fault that the miracle is walking; it’s what he did, or failed to do. The music is transcendent; the rise and fall of the melody expresses the faith and despair that love can bring. And Bruce, standing there in the burnished glow of his barn, croons it with an open-hearted fragility that’s even more moving than it was on the studio version. The yearn in his voice, the crinkle of his eye, tells you: He knows this loss.

In “Western Stars,” Springsteen strums a red C&W acoustic guitar, with Patti Scialfa, his partner of 30 years (they were married in 1991), standing at the microphone next to him, with a band behind him (piano, steel guitar, the trademark Springsteen glockenspiel), and, to his right, a 30-piece orchestra made up mostly of strings. (For some reason, all the violinists are women.) Bruce is dressed in a black work shirt, black jeans, and cowboy boots, and with his earrings, his sculptured coif, and his features that are now so lean and ruggedly lived-in that he looks like a rock ‘n’ roll Marlboro Man, the 69-year-old legend is the picture of finely aged well-being. He and Patti had three kids (now grown), and as he pointed out with a self-deprecating chuckle in his one-man show “Springsteen on Broadway,” after all his songs about cars and the open road and freedom in the night, he wound up living a stone’s throw from where he grew up.

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The image of Bruce the once wild and woolly, now  domesticated rock star is, in its way, a contented one. Yet Springsteen would probably be the first to acknowledge that an image is what it is. At one point he jokes, “This is my 19th album, and I’m still writing about cars!” In “Western Stars,” he takes a page from “Springsteen on Broadway,” telling stories about the stories he tells, and doing it with a disarming directness. He never gets too specific about personal details, but he’s eloquent enough to let us read between the lines, and what the carefully written song intros suggest is that Bruce battled his share of demons not just in the tumultuous rock-god chapter of his life when he met and fell in love with Patti, and broke up his first marriage, but after he got together with Patti.

“I’ve spent 35 years trying to let go of the destructive parts of my character,” he says, owning up to the compulsion he had to take the people he loved and cause them pain. Is he speaking of Patti? We can guess the answer is yes, and can speculate as to how he might have betrayed her. But the point is that we don’t need the gossipy details. We can imagine them, and Bruce’s mournful gravity tells us that the demons were serious.

In “Western Stars,” Springsteen spins his confessions into a beautiful and haunting tone poem, yet he remains every inch a showman. He co-directed the movie himself, along with his longtime music-video and film collaborator Thom Zimny (who also directed “Springsteen on Broadway”), and what they’ve done it to break up the 83-minute movie into sections framed by images of Bruce in the Joshua Tree desert, riding pickups and wandering trails with wild horses. It’s a version of the mythological Bruce — but what we hear on the soundtrack is the introspective Bruce, letting us know that his struggles are ours. He says that the conflict between rootless freedom and the yearning for home — for family — is central to the American character, and while put that way it can sound a touch grandiose, listening to Bruce you realize that everyone, including you, has probably lived a version of that story.

In “Western Stars,” Bruce’s songwriting goes right back to the aesthetic of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht: take the darkness and write jaunty tunes about it. In fact, there are moments that I wish Bruce wouldn’t use quite so many major chords. Yet his performance of this song suite has a soulful and gratifying unity. Not all the songs are about love. He’s got some tasty, burned-in-old-wood character portraits in there, like the title track, about a has-been B-movie actor who is beaten down but alive and kicking (“I wake up in the morning, just glad my boots are on”), or “Drive Fast (The Stuntman),” that could have fit right into “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.” Adding to the nostalgia is a sprinkling of Bruce’s home movies, including a touchingly unguarded closing-credits video of he and Patti on their honeymoon (the bottles of booze on a table hinting, perhaps, at demons to come).

“Western Stars” is set to open on 375 screens on Oct. 25, and it represents something I’d love to see more of: a wide-release concert film featuring an artist from the age of classic pop stardom. Music docs are proliferating like mushrooms these days, but most of them are semi-under the radar. To reach a national audience, they’ve generally got to feature someone like Justin Bieber or Katy Perry. “Western Stars” isn’t a rockin’-out extravaganza; it’s intimate in its embrace. Yet it’s a moving testament to how much Bruce Springsteen has still got it. It’s a concert film you’ll want to experience with others, as a ray of light in the dark.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Gala Presentations), Sept. 12, 2019. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 83 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release of a Western Stars Films production. Producers: Thom Zimny, Jon Landau, George Travis, Barbara Carr. Executive producer: Bruce Springsteen.
• Crew: Directors: Thom Zimny, Bruce Springsteen. Camera (color, widescreen): Joe Desalvo. Editor: Thom Zimny. Music: Bruce Springsteen.
• With: Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa.

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‘Western Stars’ Review: Bruce Springsteen and Broken Cowboys

This concert film, directed by the singer and Thom Zimny, puts Bruce in a barn with an orchestra to make some magic.

By Ken Jaworowski

“You can get a little too fond of the blues,” Bruce Springsteen sings in “Hello Sunshine.” It’s a song about the seductiveness of melancholy, one that warns, “You fall in love with lonely, you end up that way.”

On the album “Western Stars,” the tune is poignant. Yet during the sublime concert film of the same name, the song becomes still more affecting as we watch Bruce, who’s now 70, add a stronger, harder undercurrent of cautious hope.

That kind of chemistry emerges often in “Western Stars,” which Springsteen directed with Thom Zimny. Bruce performs the album’s 13 songs (and one encore) with a band, an orchestra and a small audience all together in close quarters — an old barn on the singer’s property in New Jersey.

Fans eager for the electricity of Springsteen’s stadium shows should readjust their expectations. The energy here is controlled, the mood reflective. These character-driven songs are populated by the washed-up and the run-down — an aging actor, a hitchhiker — and the shared themes are remembrance and regret.

Springsteen sings with little flourish under soft yet precise lighting, and with editing that keeps each shot in place for just the right amount of time. Between songs, he offers thoughts and memories (though some images can be a tad too wistful, and few of his notions are as insightful as those in his recent book and Broadway show ). The interludes, taped separately at Joshua Tree National Park in California, feature photos and film footage, and like the album, evoke the mythic American West.

“Everybody’s broken in some way,” Springsteen says in one of those moments. Yet the emotions here never turn too bleak. That’s because his characters press on, mending themselves again and again. With such determination, no story can ever be entirely sad.

Western Stars

Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes.

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‘Western Stars’ Film Review: Bruce Springsteen Gets Introspective in Beautiful Performance Film

Toronto Film Festival 2019: Borrowing from the imagery of his recent album of the same name, the film directed by Springsteen and Thom Zimny is both an intimate concert film and a series of musings on solitude and community

The film begins with an aerial shot of a wide-open desert plain, with wild horses running free. There’s an old barn, a car, a weathered hand sporting turquoise jewelry grasping a steering wheel, a silhouette of a man in a cowboy hat.

That’s not the way you would normally think of Bruce Springsteen introducing himself — but “Western Stars,” which had its world premiere on Thursday at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, is not a normal Bruce Springsteen film. Borrowing from the imagery of his recent album of the same name, it’s both an intimate concert film and a series of musings on solitude and community in song and story.

And if it places New Jersey’s rock ‘n’ roll poet laureate in a different setting from most of his work, it is wholly true to the spirit of a remarkable artist who has spent the last few decades grappling with personal demons and being open about his search for peace and refuge.

The film, which will be released by Warner Bros. in October, is essential viewing for Springsteen fans, of course (and I am in that camp, of course), but it has the grace and humanity to connect outside his devoted fan base as well.

“Western Stars” goes far deeper than the usual performance document, to sensitively explore what he sees as the state of his, and our, lives. It’s a ruminative, almost elegiac look at Springsteen’s life and career, filled with moments of uncommon beauty that makes it of a piece with this latest, most introspective phase of his career.

“Everybody’s broken in some way,” he says at one point. “In this life, nobody gets away unhurt… We’re always trying to find somebody whose broken pieces fit with our broken pieces, and something whole emerges.”

Over the past decade, Springsteen has released a string of full-length films to accompany his albums, but most have been either concert performances or making-of documentaries — and until now, most of them have been credited solely to Springsteen’s longtime collaborator, director Thom Zimny. But “Western Stars” is even more of a collaboration, sporting Springsteen’s name alongside Zimny as co-director.

(The two men also share the directing credit on 2014’s 10-minute short “Hunter of Invisible Game,” which fashioned a Cormac McCarthy-style post-apocalyptic scenario around a Springsteen song.)

Together, Springsteen and Zimny take a deep dive into the “Western Stars” album, which on the surface might have seemed an odd choice for that kind of treatment. When Springsteen put out the album in June, it was immediately clear that he’d turned the rather remarkable trick of making a completely singular record almost 50 years deep in his recording career.

Like very few of his other albums — the improvisational sprawl of 1973’s “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” and the raucous folk of 2006’s “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” come to mind, but not much else — “Western Stars” seems to stand alone in style and feel.

It also seemed at the time to be a departure for the man who’d spent the last couple of years fashioning and performing his Broadway show, “Springsteen on Broadway.” That project was the most personal thing Springsteen had ever done, a startlingly intense and intimate evening of songs and stories that drew direct connections between his life and his work.

“Western Stars,” on the other hand, felt like one of the least personal things Springsteen had done. The songs, with their country influences and with arrangements drawn from Los Angeles pop of the late ’60s and early ’70s, told the stories of characters adrift in the West: A hitchhiker, a long-haul truck driver, a fading star of Western movies, a stuntman, a failed country songwriter.

Springsteen has long explored his own issues through working-class characters, but the lives he depicts in the “Western Stars” songs felt like people from another world; the album was lovely, but on the surface it didn’t seem to say much about the man who made it, other than that he loved the records Glen Campbell made with Jimmy Webb and wanted to try his hand at that kind of thing.

But “Western Stars,” the film, shatters that take on “Western Stars,” the album. It is built around a performance of the complete album that took place in the hayloft of a 140-year-old barn on Springsteen’s property in New Jersey. Together with a 30-piece orchestra that includes strings, horns and five singers arranged by Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, the performances capture the lushness of the album but also bear down harder, making the songs a little rougher and a little sharper.

“It’s a place filled with the best kind of ghosts and spirits,” Springsteen says of the barn, and his performance lets those spirits come out to play.

In between the album’s 13 songs, Springsteen talks. In a way, this pulls “Western Stars” into the “Springsteen on Broadway” universe, making it a combination of intimate live performances linked by monologues that make personal connections between the work and the man who made it.

But Springsteen isn’t talking to the camera or to an audience, and for the most part he’s not telling anecdotes about his life – instead, he’s talking about the emotional roots of the songs and the characters on the “Western Stars” album, which he calls “a 13-song meditation on the struggle between individual freedom and communal life.”

Heard in voiceover while the camera gives quick glimpses of Bruce in the bar, Bruce on the ranch, Bruce in the car, Springsteen can sometimes sound a little stilted. But there’s no mistaking the depth of feeling he brings to this work, in which an array of characters stand in for his own struggles to stop running away, to stop hurting the people in his life, to embrace his better angels.

The songs and the stories nudge “Western Stars” to life as a moving chronicle of a man who will turn 70 later this month. “The older you get, the heavier that baggage becomes that you haven’t sorted through,” he says, making it clear that the album and the movie is part of that sorting-through.

Musically expansive and emotionally telling, “Western Stars” works through the album’s pain and hurt until it finds refuge in “Hello Sunshine,” the song that insists on fashioning a happy ending. “A love song … is the redemption of your heart,” he says. “We drive out of the darkness into sunshine and love.”

It makes for a lovely benediction, and he follows it with some goofy home movies of himself and Scialfa, and then with a performance of the album closer, “Moonlight Motel.” By this point, the small audience has left and the barn is empty, and Springsteen takes a song that sounds lonely on the album and claims it for love and beauty.

But it wouldn’t be a Bruce Springsteen performance without an encore, so Bruce and the band send us home with a cover version of a hit from Glen Campbell, whose songs from the 1960s and ’70s helped inspire “Western Stars.”

I won’t reveal which Glen Campbell song it is, except to say it’s one of the last ones I would want to hear. But it’s great anyway, and one more surprise in a film that finds new dimensions to the work of an essential artist.

Review: Bruce Springsteen’s poignant ‘Western Stars’ provides a guide to the damaged soul

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Concert films, even the good ones, can all too often seem like adjuncts in a creative life, while music videos often just act as commercials, and biodocs typically signal a career at the end or in need of a push. Can a movie headlining a musician ever be its own special contribution to the oeuvre?

The performance film “Western Stars” feels like that for rock superstar Bruce Springsteen, who’s been in something of a reflective yet still artistic mind-set for a few years now, having excelled at memoir ( 2016’s “Born to Run” ), and reinforced his legendary live chops by way of a powerfully autobiographical Broadway show . Now he’s taken the reins as a movie director (alongside regular film collaborator Thom Zimny ) for a visual companion to his recently released, same-named album — an elegiac song cycle of brokenness and love inspired by the mythic pull of Southern California’s open spaces, sundowns and cowboy mind-set — that in its intimacy and honesty plays as if this is the way these songs were always meant to be enjoyed.

In this case, that means in an old, cathedral-like barn with a band (not E Street) and a strings-and-horns orchestra, in front of a small crowd, with his wife Patti Scialfa often playing right alongside him. And in between each of the 13 searching new songs are fragments filmed on dusty roads, picturesque deserts (that’s Joshua Tree) or lonely inside spaces, in which Springsteen’s rich growl speaks to the inspiration for each memorably crafted tale of hard-bitten, inward-looking souls, like the title tune’s narrator, who tells us, “I wake up in the morning, just glad my boots are on.”

Having forged a richly poetic career out of anxious down-and-outers itching to escape their lives — if they even know what they want — Springsteen’s new tunes take the notion of the West as a freedom seeker’s destination and explore what happens when there’s nowhere left to go but backward, to relive old pains and regrets as a way of finding a mindful peace. His cracked exiles include a faded western star, a battered stuntman and a failed songwriter. The weary figure singing “Hello Sunshine” recalls how the open road once held so much, but now, hungry for something like a grounding love, he realizes, “miles to go is miles away.”

In the opening montage of horses and morning light, with the man himself dressed like an old ranch hand, Springsteen describes the songs as “a meditation on the struggle between individual freedom and communal life.” But in the concert scenes, watching him in this evocatively lit, rustic space — his raggedy rock star light dialed down to a burnished troubadour glow — he masterfully strides both qualities: solitary storyteller and bandleader. He can make you believe he’s the only one on stage — as during the bleakly stock-taking “Somewhere North of Nashville” — but he can also turn to the string section during a sweeping, Jimmy Webb-like stretch of symphonic melody like the one in “The Wayfarer” and give a look to a pair of energetic cellists that says, yeah, we’re all jammin’ here.

The spoken interludes, which touch on love, character and life lessons, are where Springsteen , who recently turned 70, adds personal context, talking about his own darkness, failings and the rocky wisdom that comes with age and family. This leads naturally to a feeling that “Western Stars” the film — in the occasional home movie snippet featuring his wife, or tender vibe when they share a microphone — is also a nod to the healing love and stability he’s found with Scialfa.

It makes for a poignancy when the song is a widower’s wistful tale (the quietly aching “Moonlight Motel”), as if the strength to sing something so sad is only possible with her there, too. By the end, you almost want every recording artist with Springsteen’s compassion and lyricism to introduce their newest material the way he does in “Western Stars,” like a docent of everyone’s damaged soul, pointing to the parts that make not just the music, but the musician, too.

'Western Stars'

Rated: PG, for some thematic elements, alcohol and smoking images, and brief language Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes Playing: In general release

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Western Stars Reviews

Bruce Springsteen's filmic love letter to his latest album is sweet and spellbinding, if a little contrived at times.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 23, 2021

Western Stars is an intimate performance with great music, lyrical soul-searching and a restless spirit that suggests Springsteen is mining his baggage to create vital, beautiful new art.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2021

It's a rockin' great time in Bruce's barn, one that leaves you feeling just that little more inspired and contented than when you first entered the cinema, proving to be as smooth and warming as a shot of mighty fine Tequila.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2020

In Western Stars, [Bruce] continues to explore his self-destructive impulses and the emotions they inspire.

Full Review | Aug 14, 2020

Western Stars is deeply invested in The Myth of Bruce Springsteen, as though he's invited the audience into his barn, but not into his heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 19, 2020

Bruce Springsteen is THE BOSS, but this Western Stars documentary makes him a legend.

Full Review | Dec 25, 2019

Shot at [Bruce's] barn in New Jersey among friends and family, the setting is so intimate it feels you received your very own invitation.

Full Review | Dec 12, 2019

Western Stars isn't going to break the music documentary mold, and there are some interstitial segments that are honestly downright cheesy, but if you're a Springsteen fan, you should find plenty to love about it.

Full Review | Nov 13, 2019

The performance footage is mesmerising, as Springsteen articulates the intimacy of lyrics imbued with themes of a mythic West, despite sharing the stage with a full electric band and a 30-piece orchestra.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 11, 2019

We can stare at his iconic Boss pose - sturdy, bent-kneed, poised like a hood ornament into the wind... but like the music itself, it feels a little too smooth, a little too contrived and just a teensy bit cheesy to embrace on a deeply personal level.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 10, 2019

Each song is performed live in the film, and each song is set up with a short video narrated by Springsteen explaining the inspiration for each song. This movie is as much about Springsteen the man, as it is about Springsteen, the performer.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Nov 8, 2019

Boss, I never should have doubted you.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Nov 2, 2019

A captivating musical experience brought to the screen that expresses both the nature of Bruce Springsteen and the meaning behind his album Western Stars.

Full Review | Nov 1, 2019

Who says you can't teach an old Boss new tricks?

The overly scripted interludes clash with the authenticity of the show, which is plenty strong on its own.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2019

It defies the parameters of cinema to create a transfixing work of exceptional elegance.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2019

It's the cutaways between songs that stitch it all together with an emotional thread that charts its subject's struggles over the decades.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 29, 2019

The result is truly cherishable, especially if you're a fan, but maybe even if you're not - because it's hard not to be beguiled by Bruce's charisma, his heartfelt, melancholic meditations on life, and of course his sound.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 28, 2019

A lovely film that delves deep into the history of Bruce [Springsteen], particularly his young life.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2019

The songs fit snugly in the Springsteen canon, as they're populated with the gristle of American life.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 28, 2019

‘Western Stars’ Is Part Concert Film, Part Visual Album, All Springsteen

By David Fear

Listen to the opening track of Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars , the album he put out this past May, and you’ll hear someone bragging about “hitch-hikin’ all day long.” He accepts a ride from a man and his pregnant wife; then he grabs a lift from someone else, just a guy free to heed the call of the open road. Two cuts later, on a song called “Tucson Train,” we get a different tale — maybe he’s a new protagonist; maybe he’s the same romantic drifter of “Hitch Hikin'” and a hundred other Springsteen tracks — who had lost his way and lost and his true love. But now he’s settled down, he’s ready to be part of society, he’s watching that 5:15 train bringing his baby to him to show up. (It takes a lot to laugh, etc.)

There are 11 more tunes, some of which are country-tinged ballads and others that are Seventies SoCal symphony pop. But you could argue that the whole story is there in those two tracks. The dude who was born to run. The man who’s finally ready to earn and embrace the human touch.

Should you still be unsure at what he’s getting at, Springsteen spells it out as plain as can be in the beginning of Western Stars, the concert film-cum-visual album he and longtime collaborator/codirector Thom Zimny premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday night. (It hits theaters October 25th.) His collection of songs about road warriors and B-movie actors, beat-up stuntmen and places where truckers and bikers drink together, is a look at “the two sides of the American character…individual freedom and communal life.” He says this over panoramic shots that turn the record’s cover of a running mustang into a literal motion picture, interspersed with clips of home movies. A close-up details a hand on a pickup’s steering wheel, ready to skeedaddle. The shot is repeated 90 or so mins later, with another hand now resting tenderly on top of the original one. This is the journey Springsteen wants you take here. It’s the same one, he notes, that he’s been taking over the last 35 years.

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After releasing this solo project, the songwriter knew he wasn’t going to support the record with a tour . Still, he wanted to do something to, in his words, “get this music live to an audience.” Springsteen came up with the idea of playing the whole thing start to finish, then capture the event on film for posterity. He and Zimny, the filmmaker behind dozens of Bruce-related music videos and making-of-album docs, started to scout locations; they eventually settled on the top floor of the barn on Springsteen’s property. (“We dressed the space up quite a bit,” he admitted in a Q&A after an afternoon press screening.) The notion was to put on an intimate show “for a few friends, and to entertain the horses.” Just a small crowd, a honkytonk-style bar, a scrappy band buffered by an orchestral section, and a singer with a guitar.

And as a performance film, Western Stars is a pitch-perfect example of why this music needed to be played and heard live. On record, you can feel Springsteen working his way through some uncharacteristic styles: Jimmy Webb-style C&W lite, Brian Wilson’s baroque pop, Everly Brothers-like crooning, musical arrangements that wouldn’t be out of place on an old Harry Nilsson joint (listen to that gossamer shuffle that opens up “Hello Sunshine” and tell me you don’t expect the first line to be “Everybody’s talkin’ at me…”). Seeing him take on those songs on a stage, however, and you get the sense he owns all of it now — he’s turned all of these influences into a seamless Springsteen sound. A number of the cuts open up like an oxygenated bottle of wine, whether it’s because there’s a gaggle of string players or a single partner in crime — the interplay between him and wife/guitarist Patti Scialfa on “Stones” deepens the cut substantially — bringing something else out of him.

But what you see in the live versions is the sum of these parts as one cohesive whole. He’s a singer in sync with the musical community surrounding him, a concept as thematically on point with the album as possible. (Thankfully, the soundtrack to the film will also be released, which means you’ll get Springsteen & Co.’s gorgeous cover of Glenn Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” — an impromptu coda that, Zimny says, he didn’t know Bruce was going to do. The fact that a cameraman was nearby and quickly caught it was a stroke of luck.) Those moments share screen time with free-form scenes of Bruce wandering alone through the California desert near Joshua Tree, offering comments on both the songs and his own struggle to reconcile his stoic loner and loving husband/father sides. There are stoic poses galore, as well old clips of scruffy young Springsteen and rare Super 8 films of his honeymoon with Scialfa that Zimny found buried in the archives.

Watch the Trailer for Bruce Springsteen’s Concert Film ‘Western Stars’

Bruce springsteen sets out for wide open territory on 'western stars'.

Sometimes he cracks wise (“Nineteen albums, and I’m still writing about cars”). Sometimes he goes into saloon-philosopher mode, offering the sort of deep thoughts (“Walk on through the dark, because that’s where the next morning is”) that longtime fans will tell you are part of the ride when you pay for the ticket. All of it seems part of the self-reflective phase Springsteen has been going through over the past few years; he admitted in the Q&A that the movie is the last part of “a story I haven’t really told before” that includes his 2016 memoir Born to Run and his 2018 Broadway residency. Introspection suits him, especially if this is the kind of art we’re getting from him now. He’d hoped the film would help people understand a little better what the songs were getting at. Mission accomplished.

But Western Stars isn’t a therapy session. It’s a portrait of lightning momentarily bottled, the way all great concert movies are. It’s the pleasure of watching a guy who’s been doing this for 50-plus years find yet another way to make it fresh without abandoning what made it great in the first place. And it’s also a personal look at someone working it out through his music, looking to find a sense of peace in the spotlight and realizing, with a sigh of relief, that he’s actually found it.

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Movie Reviews

Springsteen concert film 'western stars' sheds no new light.

Chris Klimek

Bruce Springsteen brings his new album to the silver screen in the concert movie, Western Skies. Rob DeMartin/Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Bruce Springsteen brings his new album to the silver screen in the concert movie, Western Skies.

Newly-minted septuagenarian Bruce Springsteen has been firmly in legacy mode ever since he took that long knee-slide across the stage at the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show a decade ago.

To hear him tell it, not long after his then-59-year-old crotch smooshed up against the camera lens as 97.4 million viewers watched helplessly, he began writing what became his 2016 memoir Born to Run. In the book, he was newly candid about his struggles with depression, and how a skinny longhair who "never saw the inside of a factory" dreamt up the persona of working-class humility and gentle masculinity that the world has known for 40-odd years as The Boss. He then adapted the book into a Tony Award-winning solo play and Netflix special. A few years earlier, he'd begun releasing low-cost recordings of concerts from throughout his career via his website — a curatorial gesture from a legendary performer whose gigs had always been widely bootlegged.

Legacy mode.

So what to make of Western Stars, the new sight-track to his first record of all-new material since that knee slide? Initially conceived as a concert film intended to take the place of a tour supporting Western Stars -the-album, Springsteen and longtime videographer Thom Zimny (who here shares directing credit with The Boss for the first time) elected during the editing process to expand its scope. The spine of the film remains the 14-song concert; Springsteen fronting a 30-piece orchestra in a hundred-year-old barn on his New Jersey horse farm, doing all the Western Stars numbers plus a dead-earnest cover of "Like a Rhinestone Cowboy" — a hit for Glen Campbell in the same year that Born to Run (the album, not the book) landed a 25-year-old Springsteen on the covers of Time and Newsweek .

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It's the collective half-hour of interstitial material that's more suspect. We get drone-shot aerial footage of horses running free in Jersey and in Joshua Tree, voiceover that can't help but feel more portentous than the spoken introductions that might've accompanied these songs on stage, and typical music-video slo-mo stuff of The Boss driving his mid-century pickup truck along that dusty plain, hobbling into the barn, vamoosing down that lonesome old trail. I'm Bruce Springsteen, the movie says whenever its star isn't actually speaking, and I approved this message .

Springsteen has said he considers Western Stars- the-Movie to be the third part of a trilogy comprising Born to Run and Springsteen on Broadway . The difference is that this time he's reflecting on his life through songs he wrote in his late sixties, instead of recontextualizing ones he wrote in (primarily) his twenties and thirties. And because so many of the Western Stars songs are written in character, there's some grinding of the gears when he shifts into plain talk about his own emotionally self-destructive tendencies. "For a long time, if I loved you, I'd hurt you if I could," isn't a lyric; it's just a thing he tells us. The weathered sound of his speaking voice is often more expressive than the platitudes he's intoning, which rarely tell us anything he hasn't said more eloquently in song.

As is so often the case with concert films, the best stuff is the least premeditated stuff: There's what looks like camcorder-shot footage of Springsteen and his longtime spouse/longer-time bandmate Patti Scialfa (who sings and plays guitar in the concert portion) clowning around together that probably dates from around the time they were married, in 1991. This is the most moving footage in the film because of its modesty; it was never intended for public exhibition, and it looks candid and true.

As for the musical performances, they're strong but not revelatory in the way Springsteen's live interpretations of his songs so often have been. That's because what's often most rewarding about the concert experience — especially with an artist who has such a deep catalog to draw upon — is discovering how the new songs complement selected old ones, and how rearranging songs for the stage can reveal elements that got buffed out of their studio incarnations. Contemporary recording technology offers musicians an unlimited number of choices, and many of them reconsider those choices when it's time to take those songs on the road.

But hiring an orchestra and confining the set list to the new songs means the live arrangements here are often indistinguishable the ones on Western Stars -the-album, and we don't hear anything from the Springsteen catalog reinterpreted for this lush 30-piece idiom. Springsteen's E Street-band-less tours behind The Ghost of Tom Joad in mid-90s and The Seeger Sessions a decade later foregrounded the songs from those records but also reinterpreted his older work in a way that made it feel renewed. Western Stars doesn't offer those kinds of discoveries.

For those inclined to view Springsteen as a preening poseur, Western Stars will be as laughable as anything in This Is Spinal Tap or Popstar. But even casual fans are unlikely to seek out as niche an item as Western Stars, the movie of the album, for which this there also a separate soundtrack recording available. And for Springsteen diehards — I'm raising my hand now — this is not the rich visual expansion of a very good album that its author hoped to make. It's too late to get Jonathan Demme to cinematize The River, sadly, but you could still talk to Terrence Malick about doing Nebraska. Or take a meeting with Paul Schrader and John Sayles about Born in the U.S.A. Think it over, Boss. Your legacy is too important for you to direct it yourself.

• Bruce Springsteen

• Warner Bros.

Summary Springsteen’s first studio album in five years, Western Stars marks a departure for the legendary singer/songwriter while still drawing on his roots. Touching on themes of love and loss, loneliness and family and the inexorable passage of time, the documentary film evokes the American West—both the mythic and the hardscrabble—weaving ar ... Read More

• Documentary

Directed By : Bruce Springsteen, Thom Zimny

Western Stars

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‘Western Stars’ Review: Bruce Springsteen’s Directorial Debut Is an Intimate and Unexpected Concert Doc

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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Even casual listeners of Bruce Springsteen ‘s songs are well-aware of The Boss’ many obsessions — America, cars, love, small towns, tough times, personal growth, denim — and his first turn behind the camera speaks to his consistent “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” ethos that has already guided so much of his work. Part concert doc, part personal rumination on all the things that make Bruce, well,  Bruce , “ Western Stars ” serves as both an intimate exploration of Springsteen’s latest album of the same name and a deeper dive into his most pervasive compulsions. Springsteen’s natural charisma shines through at every turn, and while Bruce neophytes might not totally buy his particular brand of profundity, old admirers will appreciate his usual tricks. As ever, Bruce means what he says.

Both the album (released earlier this summer) and film were, as Springsteen explains during an opening voiceover, conceived of as a response to the inherent dichotomy of American life: the desire for individual freedoms and the need for a community. It’s Springsteen, through and through. Still, there are some evolutions to enjoy here, as Springsteen steps behind the camera for the first time, serving as director alongside his longtime collaborator Thom Zimny, who previously directed a number of Springsteen videos and the documentary “The Ties That Bind.” It’s a fitting directorial debut, and one that combines Springsteen’s deep stagecraft (and Zimny’s, the Emmy winner also directed “Springsteen on Broadway,” another Bruce joint that goes beyond standard concert doc conventions) with more cinematic diversions.

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While Springsteen and his band — including wife and constant creative partner Patti Scialfa, herself a big draw — play each song on stage in album order, the stories behind their creation are delivered solely by Springsteen via a series of arty vignettes. The singer and songwriter is again mining his typical interests for the material (lots of cars, more love stories, plenty of tough times), a pop-inflected country album made epic by the inclusion of a thirty-piece orchestra, but the presentation and design of “Western Stars” is indeed something fresh.

Cutting between the “live” performance (set in the Springsteens’ own 100-year-old barn, big enough for the band, the orchestra, the crew, and a hand-picked audience), the interstitial explanations find Springsteen playing at both himself and attempting to lightly embody some of the many characters that populate the record. While some scenes find Springsteen strolling and driving around the desert reminiscing about his own life, including the occasional use of archival footage and old pictures to literally illustrate his points, others find him more directly engaging with the more fictionalized elements of the record. Springsteen has always been open about his emotions, less reticent to share specific experiences — though, in recent years, he’s shared much more, including on Broadway and in his autobiography “Born to Run” — and “Western Stars” finds him back in a place where feelings reign over facts.

Until, that is, Springsteen starts to slip inside the stories of other people. He makes no bones about his affection for creating characters to craft songs both about and around, and “Western Stars” includes a variety of such colorful and compelling personas. From the fading Western star (in the eponymous song, Springsteen jokes about his character being shot by John Wayne while on the job) to a banged-up stuntman and even a kid who runs away from a heartbreak by taking a job breaking horses, “Western Stars” is filled with Springsteen stand-ins who allow him to further explore his themes. Cinematographer Joe DeSalvo, another Springsteen regular, shoots The Boss with ease and intimacy, bringing us in close both on the stage and off.

Western Stars Review

28 Oct 2019

Western Stars

You don’t get a Bruce Springsteen movie forever and then two come along at once. Following Gurinder Chadha ’s love-letter to The Boss, Blinded By The Light , that riffed on Springsteen’s back-catalogue, Western Stars delivers the latest cuts. Co-directed by Springsteen and regular filmmaking collaborator Thom Zimny (who also directed Springsteen On Broadway ), it’s a companion piece to Springsteen’s recent studio album that manages to transcend the standard concert film or DVD extra by augmenting the music with short films that tie the songs together, translate Springsteen’s world into cinematic language and provide deeper insight into the man himself.

Unable to take an album that features a 30-piece orchestra on the road, Springsteen decided to put a live performance of the album on film at his 100-year-old barn on his Colts Neck property in New Jersey filled, according to Springsteen, with “ghosts and spirits”.

The 13-song album tackles the dynamic between individual freedom and communal life (“the two impulses run against each other in everyday America”) and sees Springsteen back on his musical bullshit, singing about hitchhiking, pictures of pretty girls on the dashboard (“This is my 19th album, and I’m still writing about cars!” he quips), rocking out on Saturday night at a roadside café and pouring his personal demons into mini narratives about an ageing cowboy actor who is down but not out (“Once I was shot by John Wayne/Yeah it was towards the end/That one scene’s bought me a thousand drinks”) or a broken stuntman in a song that might have played over the end credits of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood .

It’s not a film about ‘Springsteen’ or ‘The Boss’, it’s a film about Bruce from New Jersey.

Influenced by the Californian pop of Jimmy Webb or Burt Bacharach, the results are sweeping, melancholy and magical. It’s also an album and gig about love lost and found, epic and intimate at the same time. ‘There Goes My Miracle’, a moving duet with wife Patti Scialfa, sees Zimny’s camera capturing the intimacy between the singers and the unspoken communication with the band.

In between each song we get a series of short-tone poems, with Springsteen ruminating on the autobiographical links and thematic ideas raised by the songs. Structurally it gets repetitive and the revelations never get specific or juicy but there’s stuff here — the sense of regret and self rebuke — that deepens your relationship to the singer and the songs. The voiceover is accompanied by films (evocatively scored by Springsteen) consisting of slow-motion footage of horses, Springsteen in Joshua Tree country or driving in a pick-up truck — the poetry of Springsteen’s America.

Perhaps the best moment features some home-movie footage of Springsteen and Patti on honeymoon, clowning around in front of a log cabin surrounded by booze. Surprising and candid, it grounds Springsteen as a character in his own songs and speaks to the intimacy to the whole film. Ultimately it’s not a film about ‘Springsteen’ or ‘The Boss’, it’s a film about Bruce from New Jersey. And that’s what makes Western Stars so valuable.

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Bruce Springsteen Pioneers Grandpa Rock With New ‘Western Stars’ Film 

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• Western Stars

Dad rock is dead. Grandpa rock is the new new. Gen Xers with horn rim glasses revisiting their older brother’s classic rock records? Yesterday’s news. Banjo-fondling douchebags playing “old timey” music? Well, that’s actually Great Grandfather rock and it’s sooooo 2012. What are the big singles of spring 2020? Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. Who’s running for President of the United States? Two dudes in their 70s in possible cognitive decline. Now the freakin’ Boss is here to codify the movement, spinning yarns and life lessons while performing his new album in the film Western Stars , which is currently streaming on HBO .

Released last summer, Springsteen has said his Western Stars album was influenced by the “Southern California pop music of the ’70s,” and such artists as Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb, and Burt Bacharach. Just like grandpa, he gets the dates wrong, as their artistic heyday was the late ’60s, but close enough. “ Western Stars is a 13-song meditation on the struggle between individual freedom and communal life,” he tells us at the film’s outset. To Springsteen, these are the “two sides of the American character,” which, “rub up against one another always and forever everyday in American life.”

Directed by Springsteen and longtime film collaborator Thom Zimny, Western Stars mixes live performances of the album’s songs with footage of the singer wandering around the American West and explaining what it all means. The title track is about a “fading Western film star,” who doesn’t understand the world around him, “doing Viagra commercials and weekend rodeoing in the desert east of Los Angeles.” Another song is about an old stuntman whose self-destructiveness ruins relationships. I guess no one told him about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood .

The performances feature Springsteen, wife Patti Scialfa and a backing band which includes a 30-piece orchestra. They were filmed in a 100-year-old barn on the Springsteens’ property in New Jersey in front of what I assume is an audience of friends. Springsteen tells us, “the hayloft is simply a spiritual place,” one filled with “the best kinds of ghosts and spirits.” A home bar to die for sits against the stage right wall and Springsteen knocks back a shot before he starts playing though the performances are anything but freewheeling. Like the aforementioned influences, these are big songs, straightforward melodically and lyrically and Springsteen and company execute them flawlessly. Maybe, too much so.

Personally, I prefer my Springsteen a little more rocked out with the sweat soaking through his work shirt, a Telecaster slung over his shoulder, and the E Street Band trying to keep up with him. At times the performances seem canned and overly polite. Interestingly, some of the songs remind me not of 1960s Southern California but 1980s Minneapolis, with “The Wayfarer” sounding like Paul Westerberg wrote it and “Tucson Train” echoing Soul Asylum’s 1993 hit, “Runaway Train.” Elsewhere, “Hello Sunshine” quite explicitly pays sonic homage to Glen Campbell ‘s “Gentle On My Mind” and Harry Nilsson ‘s “Everybody’s Talkin'”, which are in keeping with the theme of the album.

While donning a cowboy hat and driving a classic car, Springsteen talks about the flawed men behind each song, many of them, manifestations of himself. Men who hurt the ones they love, drive cars they don’t need, go places to get away from heartache and unhappiness and end up nowhere. This America’s restless word made flesh and the drone footage appropriatly shows us gulches, brambles, rodeos and saloons.

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As a performance film, Western Stars is capably done, featuring beautifully filmed footage of one of rock’s great talents and a crackerjack backing band fulfilling his orchestral ambitions. The extra-musical segments, however, do little to enhance the experience and it’s not like the material needs any explaining. We’ve heard Springsteen’s tales of failure of redemption, love, and loss before. They’re basically the same story he’s been telling since his first album. But that’s OK. Grandpa’s allowed to repeat himself now and again, and besides, it’s a good story and he tells it well.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC

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Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars review – the Boss takes the scenic route

(Columbia Records) Trailed as a break with tradition, the lush orchestrations and swooning vocals of this finely wrought album, in fact, chime beautifully with Springsteen’s history

T he 19th Bruce Springsteen album has been heralded as a dramatic break from tradition. So dramatic, in fact, that in the interviews accompanying its release, Western Stars’ author has felt impelled to reassure fans that he’ll be back recording and touring with the E Street Band later this year. It’s hard to miss the hint of “normal service will be resumed as soon as possible” about that announcement, balm for Boss fans horrified by how far Western Stars takes their hero from either of his standard musical styles .

There’s not a hint of the E Street Band’s booming Sturm und Drang, nor the stripped-back earthiness of his previous solo albums here: they’re replaced by luscious orchestrations, heavy on the strings and French horn, cooing female backing vocals, guitars that shimmer and quiver with tremolo effects, mournful pedal steel. It’s not founded in country music so much as a distinctive musical hybrid that flowed out of Hollywood’s recording studios in the late 1960s and early 70s, which stirred Nashville with west coast folk-pop and ambitious, sophisticated arrangements: the grownup American pop of Glen Campbell’s collaborations with Jimmy Webb or Harry Nilsson’s covers of Everybody’s Talkin’ and I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.

This is clearly a departure, although there’s a sense in which it’s entirely in keeping with Springsteen’s approach. His sound is almost invariably based in burnished nostalgia. The E Street Band and The Ghost of Tom Joad alike are rooted in the music that flourished in the US when Springsteen was about 12 years old: the former an amplification of pre-Beatles American pop – both the echoing drama of Phil Spector and the blare and honk of Dion and the Belmonts – the latter a take on the early 60s folk revival, with particular reference to Bob Dylan in young, keeper-of-the-Woody-Guthrie-flame mode. Western Stars simply shifts its backwards gaze on a few years, to the stuff that would have dominated mainstream taste during Springsteen’s late teens, at a time when it might have been hipper to dig Jefferson Airplane – but what budding young artist could fail to have his head turned by such consummate examples of the songwriter’s craft?

Certainly, there’s a real and rather affecting love evident in the way Springsteen channels the sound on Western Stars. There are moments of transcendent loveliness – not least the shivering instrumental coda of Drive Fast – but he’s also unafraid of its occasional tendency towards schmaltz. Quite the opposite. Listening to There Goes My Miracle or Sundown, on which he slathers on the high-camp strings and transforms his voice into a croon, denuded of the usual Springsteen grit, you get the feeling he’s having a whale of a time: an artist always held up as the apotheosis of honest, blue-collar heartland rock revelling in artifice, in much the same way as he audibly delighted in telling audiences at his Broadway residency that the character of Bruce Springsteen was a Ziggy Stardust-ish construct who had never done anything. It helps that the songs are strong enough to withstand the treatment, seldom slipping into pastiche. The only real misfire is Sleepy Joe’s Café, which feels a little round-edged for its own good, not aided by an ingratiatingly perky accordion: the E Street Band could have turned it into something more driving and potent.

“It’s the same sad story, going round and round,” Springsteen sings on The Wayfarer and listening to the rest of the album’s lyrics, you take his point. If the sound of Western Stars sets it apart from Springsteen’s earlier solo albums, the words pull it closer. Like Nebraska or The Ghost of Tom Joad, it offers a selection of bleak narratives and lingering pen-portraits, and, like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, it seems a product of its era. The former album’s cast of conflicted cops and desperate criminals undercut the gung-ho triumphalism of Reagan’s America, while Tom Joad’s illegal immigrants and drug runners did the same for an era of record highs on the Dow Jones index. Western Stars, meanwhile, is populated by characters past their best – the title track’s fading actor, reduced to hawking Viagra on TV and retelling his stories for anyone who’ll buy him a drink; Drive Fast’s injured stuntman recalling his youthful recklessness, the failed songwriter of Somewhere North of Nashville and the guy glumly surveying the boarded-up site of an old tryst on Moonlight Motel – all of them ruminating on how things have changed, not just for the worse, but in ways none of them anticipated.

It adds up to an album that manages to be both unexpected and of a piece with its author’s back catalogue. Normal service may well be resumed in due course, but Western Stars is powerful enough to make you wish Bruce Springsteen would take more stylistic detours in the future.

Western Stars is released on 14 June.

This week Alexis listened to

Bill Callahan: What Comes After Certainty The closer and standout from Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, a song that feels like an intimate, slightly rambling late-night conversation.

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‘Western Stars’ Film Review: Bruce Springsteen Gets Introspective in Beautiful Performance Film

The film begins with an aerial shot of a wide-open desert plain, with wild horses running free. There’s an old barn, a car, a weathered hand sporting turquoise jewelry grasping a steering wheel, a silhouette of a man in a cowboy hat.

That’s not the way you would normally think of Bruce Springsteen introducing himself — but “Western Stars,” which had its world premiere on Thursday at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, is not a normal Bruce Springsteen film. Borrowing from the imagery of his recent album of the same name, it’s both an intimate concert film and a series of musings on solitude and community in song and story.

And if it places New Jersey’s rock ‘n’ roll poet laureate in a different setting from most of his work, it is wholly true to the spirit of a remarkable artist who has spent the last few decades grappling with personal demons and being open about his search for peace and refuge.

Also Read: Bruce Springsteen Reflects on His Life in Wistful 'Western Stars' Trailer (Video)

The film, which will be released by Warner Bros. in October, is essential viewing for Springsteen fans, of course (and I am in that camp, of course), but it has the grace and humanity to connect outside his devoted fan base as well.

“Western Stars” goes far deeper than the usual performance document, to sensitively explore what he sees as the state of his, and our, lives. It’s a ruminative, almost elegiac look at Springsteen’s life and career, filled with moments of uncommon beauty that makes it of a piece with this latest, most introspective phase of his career.

“Everybody’s broken in some way,” he says at one point. “In this life, nobody gets away unhurt… We’re always trying to find somebody whose broken pieces fit with our broken pieces, and something whole emerges.”

Also Read: 'Blinded by the Light' Film Review: Joyous Indie Musical Soars to Songs of Bruce Springsteen

Over the past decade, Springsteen has released a string of full-length films to accompany his albums, but most have been either concert performances or making-of documentaries — and until now, most of them have been credited solely to Springsteen’s longtime collaborator, director Thom Zimny. But “Western Stars” is even more of a collaboration, sporting Springsteen’s name alongside Zimny as co-director.

(The two men also share the directing credit on 2014’s 10-minute short “Hunter of Invisible Game,” which fashioned a Cormac McCarthy-style post-apocalyptic scenario around a Springsteen song.)

Together, Springsteen and Zimny take a deep dive into the “Western Stars” album, which on the surface might have seemed an odd choice for that kind of treatment. When Springsteen put out the album in June, it was immediately clear that he’d turned the rather remarkable trick of making a completely singular record almost 50 years deep in his recording career.

Like very few of his other albums — the improvisational sprawl of 1973’s “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” and the raucous folk of 2006’s “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” come to mind, but not much else — “Western Stars” seems to stand alone in style and feel.

Also Read: How Bruce Springsteen Kept Director Thom Zimny on His Toes Making 'Springsteen on Broadway'

It also seemed at the time to be a departure for the man who’d spent the last couple of years fashioning and performing his Broadway show, “Springsteen on Broadway.” That project was the most personal thing Springsteen had ever done, a startlingly intense and intimate evening of songs and stories that drew direct connections between his life and his work.

“Western Stars,” on the other hand, felt like one of the least personal things Springsteen had done. The songs, with their country influences and with arrangements drawn from Los Angeles pop of the late ’60s and early ’70s, told the stories of characters adrift in the West: A hitchhiker, a long-haul truck driver, a fading star of Western movies, a stuntman, a failed country songwriter.

Springsteen has long explored his own issues through working-class characters, but the lives he depicts in the “Western Stars” songs felt like people from another world; the album was lovely, but on the surface it didn’t seem to say much about the man who made it, other than that he loved the records Glen Campbell made with Jimmy Webb and wanted to try his hand at that kind of thing.

But “Western Stars,” the film, shatters that take on “Western Stars,” the album. It is built around a performance of the complete album that took place in the hayloft of a 140-year-old barn on Springsteen’s property in New Jersey. Together with a 30-piece orchestra that includes strings, horns and five singers arranged by Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, the performances capture the lushness of the album but also bear down harder, making the songs a little rougher and a little sharper.

“It’s a place filled with the best kind of ghosts and spirits,” Springsteen says of the barn, and his performance lets those spirits come out to play.

In between the album’s 13 songs, Springsteen talks. In a way, this pulls “Western Stars” into the “Springsteen on Broadway” universe, making it a combination of intimate live performances linked by monologues that make personal connections between the work and the man who made it.

But Springsteen isn’t talking to the camera or to an audience, and for the most part he’s not telling anecdotes about his life – instead, he’s talking about the emotional roots of the songs and the characters on the “Western Stars” album, which he calls “a 13-song meditation on the struggle between individual freedom and communal life.”

Heard in voiceover while the camera gives quick glimpses of Bruce in the bar, Bruce on the ranch, Bruce in the car, Springsteen can sometimes sound a little stilted. But there’s no mistaking the depth of feeling he brings to this work, in which an array of characters stand in for his own struggles to stop running away, to stop hurting the people in his life, to embrace his better angels.

The songs and the stories nudge “Western Stars” to life as a moving chronicle of a man who will turn 70 later this month. “The older you get, the heavier that baggage becomes that you haven’t sorted through,” he says, making it clear that the album and the movie is part of that sorting-through.

Musically expansive and emotionally telling, “Western Stars” works through the album’s pain and hurt until it finds refuge in “Hello Sunshine,” the song that insists on fashioning a happy ending. “A love song … is the redemption of your heart,” he says. “We drive out of the darkness into sunshine and love.”

It makes for a lovely benediction, and he follows it with some goofy home movies of himself and Scialfa, and then with a performance of the album closer, “Moonlight Motel.” By this point, the small audience has left and the barn is empty, and Springsteen takes a song that sounds lonely on the album and claims it for love and beauty.

But it wouldn’t be a Bruce Springsteen performance without an encore, so Bruce and the band send us home with a cover version of a hit from Glen Campbell, whose songs from the 1960s and ’70s helped inspire “Western Stars.”

I won’t reveal which Glen Campbell song it is, except to say it’s one of the last ones I would want to hear. But it’s great anyway, and one more surprise in a film that finds new dimensions to the work of an essential artist.

Read original story ‘Western Stars’ Film Review: Bruce Springsteen Gets Introspective in Beautiful Performance Film At TheWrap

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Western Stars

By Sam Sodomsky

June 14, 2019

The voices in Western Stars are old and restless, lost and wandering. On the title track, Bruce Springsteen sings from the perspective of an actor who once worked with John Wayne but now mostly does commercials—credit cards, Viagra. Elsewhere, we meet a stuntman whose body has been destroyed by the job, a lonely widower idling in his old parking spot, and a failed country songwriter wondering if any of the sacrifices he made in his youth were worth it. Sung in a defeated growl, this latter track is among the shortest, starkest things that Springsteen has ever recorded: an acknowledgment of how quickly a song—and life—can pass by.

That song is called “Somewhere North of Nashville,” and it’s an outlier on Springsteen’s 19th studio album, both geographically and musically. On the rest of the record, Springsteen, with producer Ron Aniello, aims to conjure the golden expanse of the American West, with sweeping orchestral accompaniments unlike anything in his catalog. Springsteen albums are usually grand affairs but he’s never made one that sounds so vast and luxurious throughout. Paired with the down-and-out characters who haunt its mountains and canyons, the purposefully anachronistic arrangements—recalling jukeboxes, FM radios, sepia-toned montages, faded memories—carry an elegiac tone. It’s been a long time since popular music sounded like this, and it ties these characters to an era as much as a place.

Neither is where you expect to find Springsteen, who turns 70 this fall. He has spent the last few years drawing attention to the most beloved corners of his career, from lovingly curated box sets and live releases to an anniversary tour behind 1980’s commercial breakthrough The River . His nostalgic bent culminated in two presentations of his life story: a 500-page memoir and a one-man Broadway show. Both begin with a wink toward his self-described fraudulence—an “absurdly successful” entertainer who made his fortune by telling stories of blue-collar workers—and end with solemn prayers and reflections on mortality. In the book, Springsteen discusses the struggles with depression that have threatened to derail him over the past 10 years. “Mentally, just when I thought I was in the part of my life where I’m supposed to be cruising,” he writes, “My sixties were a rough, rough ride.”

All this looking back plays into the music of Western Stars . “Hell, these days there ain’t no ‘more,’” he sighs in the title track, “Now there’s just ‘again.’” Repetition and waiting course through the record as constants—sunrise, sunset. There’s a song called “Chasin’ Wild Horses” that prescribes its title as a means of counterbalancing pain; the arrangement grows more romantic as the chorus hardens into a routine. Springsteen’s narrative writing has always served to reflect his host of anxieties outward. A darkening mindset and feelings of isolation in his early 30s inspired him to summon the hellbound outsiders and dark highways of Nebraska ; navigating his first marriage resulted in the doubt-plagued domestic portraits on 1987’s Tunnel of Love . During his exhaustive live shows, he is known to venture into the crowd to be swarmed by the community that’s united by his work. In the studio, he has to invent it himself: a sea of faces where he can find his own reflection. Western Stars transports him to a ghost town of broken male narrators, alone with their never-ending work and shortening timelines. He sings to us from somewhere among them, looking wearily beyond.

Following 2012’s Wrecking Ball and 2014’s High Hopes —records that responded to current political issues and sought to modernize the E Street Band’s rock’n’roll exorcisms with loops and samples and Tom Morello —this music is a left turn. The stories, however, remain archetypically Springsteen. Occasionally, he sounds like he’s checking in with characters from his songbook, furthering them along or bidding them farewell. For those wild spirits who worked 9 to 5 and somehow survived till the night, there’s “Sundown,” a tour through a bittersweet twilight where you long for companionship. After all his promises of escape—these two lanes that could take us anywhere—there’s the hardened narrator of “ Hello Sunshine ,” cautioning that “miles to go is miles away.”

And while nearly every one of Springsteen’s road songs is sung from the driver's seat, this record opens with “Hitch Hikin’,” a folk song propelled by a gentle windmill of strings, sung by a drifter with nowhere to go. He invites us into the backseats of three cars, whose drivers stand in for the pillars of Springsteen’s career. There’s a father, a trucker headed toward a big open highway, and a solitary racer in a vintage model from 1972, which also happens to be the year that Springsteen scored his record deal with Columbia. These avatars introduce a record that favors new sounds and perspectives—he often sings as a shadow or a visitor, giving credence to a recently revealed habit for crashing strangers’ funerals —but remains carefully rooted in his history. David Sancious, an early collaborator who played the virtuosic piano solo in 1973’s “ New York City Serenade ,” returns here to guide “The Wayfarer” to its tragic-triumphant conclusion. His jazzy touch on the keys offsets the thump of Springsteen’s acoustic guitar and the earthy twang of his baritone, as open-hearted and desperate as it has ever sounded.

In this song, Springsteen reframes his wanderlust in a series of confessions. He acknowledges that put in his position most people would be happy with what they have. He knows his worries are nothing new. The title of Western Stars is a phrase that also appears in “Ulysses,” a 19th-century Tennyson poem that Springsteen has drawn from before . (Another, more ubiquitous, Tennyson quote is invoked at the end of this record: “It’s better to have loved,” he sings in “Moonlight Motel,” his voice trailing off.) It’s easy to see why Springsteen finds resonance in these particular texts: defining works by a grief-stricken poet wondering if our brief, complicated lives are worth the legacy we leave behind. “Ulysses” is narrated by a hero approaching old age, returning from a long journey only to realize he felt more fulfilled on the road. So he heads out again, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” And stay alive, if he can.

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Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west. Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west. Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west.

• Kevin Costner
• Sienna Miller
• 2 User reviews
• 13 Critic reviews
• 51 Metascore

• Hayes Ellison

• Frances Kittredge

• Hugh Proctor

• Diamond Kittredge

• Colonel Houghton

• Owen Kittredge

• First Lt. Trent Gephardt

• Walter Childs

• Sgt. Major Riordan

• Caleb Sykes

• Roland Bailey

• Matthew Van Weyden

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Kevin Costner 's first directorial effort since Open Range (2003) .
• Connections Followed by Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2 (2024)

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• May 19, 2024

The 2024 Festival Films You Need to Know

• When will Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 be released? Powered by Alexa
• June 28, 2024 (United States)
• United States
• Horizon: An American Saga
• New Line Cinema
• Territory Pictures Entertainment
• Warner Bros.
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• $100,000,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 3 hours 1 minute
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos

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• ‘Horizon: An American Saga’ Review: Kevin Costner’s Chapter 1 (Of 4) Sets Stage For Epic Story Of American West And Its Complicated History – Cannes Film Festival

By Pete Hammond

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Awards Columnist/Chief Film Critic

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• ‘Marcello Mio’ Review: Chiara Mastroianni & Catherine Deneuve Play Themselves In An Amusing Family Affair Like No Other – Cannes Film Festival
• ‘The Apprentice’ Review: Sebastian Stan And Jeremy Strong Soar As Young Donald Trump And His Ruthless Mentor Roy Cohn In Devilish Origin Story – Cannes Film Festival

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Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon: An American Saga’ Gets 11-Minute Ovation At Its Cannes World Premiere

Kevin Costner Reveals The Epic Journey Of His Cannes Western ‘Horizon’ And Has His Say On ‘Yellowstone’ Rancor

Running three hours, this film, scheduled for release by New Line and Warner Bros on June 28, is just “Chapter 1”, first of an unusual planned series of four separate films (not sequels) continuing the massive story, with Chapter 2 already in the can and scheduled for an August 16 release, and Chapter 3 reportedly going before the cameras imminently. Of course this multi-part saga is not unusual for television, where it thrives in the limited series form, but for movies it is virtually unheard of — along with the fact that its star/director, who has been dreaming of this in various forms since 1988, is largely footing the bill.

RELATED: ‘Horizon: An American Saga’ Cannes Film Festival Premiere Photos: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller Luke Wilson & More

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But nothing on this scale has ever been attempted for this kind of release pattern on the big screen, and I would say, at least based on the first part with its huge cast of characters and storylines woven in and out, Costner’s biggest influence may have in fact been 1963’s Cinerama production of How the West Was Won. I know from multiple interviews in the past, including mine, Costner has always noted the impact seeing that film (nominated for Best Picture and winner of three Oscars including Best Original Screenplay) with his father made a lifelong impression on him. It similarly traversed many years, characters and story arcs like Horizon does but was just one long, reserved seat movie event. Horizon has four times its spirit at the very least.

RELATED: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson & Cast Talk ‘Horizon’: “We Can’t Be Consumed With Making Our Pile Of Money Bigger As Much As Our Heart Full” – Cannes Studio

Spanning about 15 years from the end of the Civil War (a factor but not the focus here), Horizon is about the expansion and settlement of the American West, those brave white people who made their way on horse and wagon trains to the promise of a new life. Literally. In the movie Horizon is the name of a basically suburban dream. Flyers are continually seen urging people to come West. “If you want a farm or home the best thing in the West is the town of Horizon. Best grazing land in the world, the richest land, premium virgin land with pure and abundant water, temperate climate, and excellent health,” it advertises to potential settlers.

What it doesn’t say is it is also the home of American Indians, our Native Americans, many who are understandably not too keen about this development on what they consider their territory, and that it could also be a dangerous proposition. But this is a film about Manifest Destiny, and therein will lie many of the complications for these (many) people we meet along the way. And of course in different parts of the world this concept makes this movie still relevant, even as it is told as a piece of our history.

It is clear from this Chapter 1 that Costner, who co-wrote the script with Jon Baird and a story from Mark Kasdan, is interested again in this conundrum with the Indigenous population, just as he was in Dances With Wolves in going for a much deeper and complex study than what Hollywood largely did for decades in its treatment of the American Indian on film. And coming on the heels of another film that premiered in Cannes last year, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the upcoming chapters . In this one the table is set and we meet a lot of the key players, with the emphasis on those white settlers who made their way west as the Civil War had ravaged the Union, but with the promise of changing times giving hope.

Chief among the settlers is Costner’s character, Hayes Ellison, a lone wolf type who would like to keep to himself but keeps getting drawn into things he would rather avoid. He has survival and fighting skills that will come in handy, especially in some confrontations with very bad guys who are making trouble, notably the outlaw Sykes family.

This is a huge cast, but Costner tries to get them all introduced here including the intriguing Sam Worthington character of First Lt. Trent Gephardt, a soldier stationed at Fort Gallant but a guy with questions about himself and where he is going in this new world. Danny Huston’s sympathetic Col. Houghton has his hands full with the emerging droves of settlers, but knows there will be no way to stop, or possibly protect them when they get to Horizon. And you can count in Michael Rooker’s Sgt Major Riordan, who has the same concerns at Gallant.

Others include Luke Wilson’s good but reluctant leader of a wagon train, chosen against his will but trying to live up to the challenge, and Will Patton, a widower still recovering from the Civil War and accompanying his three daughters for a better shot at life.

The Native Americans are authentically cast, as you might expect in any movie from the filmmaker of Dances With Wolves. Standouts include Owen Crow Shoe as Pionsenay, an Apache warrior who is confused and frustrated with clashes with the settlers and none too pleased at this development, as opposed to brother Taklishim (a fine Tatanka Means) who is siding with their father, the Chief, in trying to be non-confrontational. Liluye (an excellent Wase Winyan Chief) is also his wife and mother of their baby, but she seems to have more fortitude and actually believes they should, like her brother-in-law, be resisting the rise of the settlers rather than sitting idly by.

Giovanni Ribisi, Glynn Turman, Tom Payne, Kathleen Quinlan, Angus MacFayden and countless others also pop in and out, some with perhaps more to do in ensuing chapters. There are more than 170 speaking roles in the series which is being shot on locations in Utah, with stunning cinematography by J. Michael Muro who captures the grandeur of the Old West in style. Other shout-outs go to Derek R. Hill’s authentic production design and John Debney’s stirring score.

For Costner, this is an impressive beginning, with the promise of more to come. It even ends with a montage of scenes from the second film coming in August, much like you might see if this were a television production, something it is defiantly not. With Horizon: An American Saga, Costner is just trying to keep the American Western alive, but he may, with this innovative roll of the dice, also be trying to keep theaters alive at the same time, that is if there is still an appetite for Westerns. Hopefully there is.

Title: Horizon: An American Saga Distributor: Warner Bros Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition) Release date: June 28, 2024 Director: Kevin Costner Screenwriters: Kevin Costner, Jon Baird Cast: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Michael Rooker, Will Patton, Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means, Wase Winyan Chief, Jamie Campbell Bower, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jon Beavers Rating: R Running time: 3 hr 1 min

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5 things to know about the Stars-Oilers Western Conference finals series

The stars and oilers are set to meet for the seventh time in the playoffs and first since 2003. the stars have a 5-1 advantage over edmonton in the postseason all-time..

By Lia Assimakopoulos

11:02 PM on May 20, 2024 CDT — Updated at 1:56 PM on May 21, 2024 CDT

The Dallas Stars are back in the Western Conference finals for the second consecutive season after defeating the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 in their second-round series.

They will face their first Canadian opponent of the postseason, as they take on the Edmonton Oilers, who won their second-round matchup with the Vancouver Canucks in seven games.

The Stars, as the Western Conference regular-season champions , have home ice advantage, meaning they’ll host Games 1 and 2 as well as Games 5 and 7 (if necessary) at American Airlines Center.

Game 1 is scheduled for Thursday at 7:30 p.m. CT.

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Here are five things to know about the Stars’ third-round matchup:

Best player in the world

Each round this postseason, the Stars have had a bigger challenge on their hands in terms of individual talent.

After getting past Jack Eichel in the first round, the Stars managed to limit Hart Trophy finalist Nathan MacKinnon in the second round, as he had just two goals and three assists in the series.

Now, they’ll have to face the best player in the world.

Connor McDavid finished third in the league in regular season with points (132) and ranks second in the league in points this postseason (21), trailing only his teammate Leon Draisaitl (24).

McDavid is a Hart Trophy Finalist this year, three-time Hart Trophy winner, five-time Art Ross Trophy winner and seven-time NHL All-Star.

The Stars have used their depth and lockdown defenseman Chris Tanev to limit elite players so far this postseason. They held McDavid to just one assist in three regular-season meetings but will have to find a way to limit him for a best-of-seven series.

“Cross your fingers, pray,” Stars coach Pete DeBoer said of what it takes to shut down McDavid. “It’s like Nate MacKinnon. It’s like Jack Eichel. You’re never going to hold them off the scoresheet. You’ve got to defend them as a five-man unit. You always have to have awareness when they’re on the ice. You’ve got to have detail to your game at all times, and you can’t take a breath because those guys will expose you.”

Old rivalry renewed

Between 1997 and 2003, the Stars and Oilers met six times in the playoffs. The teams have not played a postseason series in the 20 years since.

Dallas holds a 5-1 advantage all-time against Edmonton in the playoffs, beating them in two of the seasons they advanced to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1999 and 2000.

Both teams have deep postseason histories, as the Stars are in the conference finals for the seventh time and the Oilers are this deep for the 11th time. However, they have only made the conference finals twice since the turn of the century — in 2006 and 2022.

Edmonton has won five Stanley Cups — all in a seven-year span between 1984 and 1990.

Goalie advantage for Dallas

Like last round, the Stars enter another series with an advantage by having Jake Oettinger in goal.

After goalie battles each night in the Vegas series, Oettinger was the better netminder compared to Colorado’s Alexandar Georgiev last round. Dallas will now face an Edmonton team that has had some goaltending issues.

Edmonton starter Stuart Skinner has been inconsistent in his first 10 playoff games, posting a .881 save percentage and 2.87 goals-against average. Both numbers are the worst among goalies still in the playoffs.

Skinner was benched ahead of Game 4, as Edmonton turned to Calvin Pickard to make his first NHL playoff start. Skinner was pulled in the second period of Game 3 after allowing four goals on 15 shots.

Pickard has a .915 save percentage and 2.21 goals-against average in his three playoff games, but he was ultimately replaced again by Skinner for Games 6 and 7. Skinner got wins in the last two games of the series but faced just 32 combined shots.

Oettinger, on the other hand, has improved as the playoffs have gone on. He has a 2.09 goals-against average and .918 save percentage — both impressive in his first 13 starts.

Special teams threat gets even greater

Throughout the Colorado series, special teams determined the winner in the first five games and nearly cost Dallas in Game 6, as the Avalanche’s only goal that night came on the power play.

The Stars were lights-out on the penalty kill during Games 2 through 4 , but once Colorado got going on the man-advantage, it was lethal.

Edmonton will be an even greater challenge in that regard. Its power play was connecting over 40% of the time just a few days ago but fell to 37.5%. That still leads the league this postseason. It also has the best penalty kill at 91.4%.

Dallas ranks 11th in the playoffs in penalty kill (69.2%) and fourth in power play (29%).

The Stars served the fewest penalty minutes in the league in the regular season and will need to keep that up in the series against the Oilers to keep them off the power play.

Stars controlled regular-season series

The regular-season results haven’t meant much for Dallas so far this postseason, as it went just 1-3-3 against Vegas and Colorado in their seven regular-season meetings. However, Dallas does appear to have Edmonton somewhat figured out.

The Stars were 2-0-1 in their three meetings and capped off the regular-season series with a stunning 5-0 win on national television in April , which set a franchise record as the Stars extended their win streak at the time to eight games.

Dallas also held Draisaitl to two assists and McDavid to one in the regular season.

If the Stars can translate that game plan to the playoffs, at least for Edmonton’s stars, it could bode well for them in a best-of-seven series.

On X/Twitter: @Lassimak

Find more Stars coverage from The Dallas Morning News here .

Lia Assimakopoulos , Staff Reporter . Lia Assimakopoulos covers the Dallas Stars and high school sports for The Dallas Morning News. She joined The News in June 2022 and previously contributed to Sports Illustrated, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, NBC Sports and the Washington City Paper. A native of Bethesda, Md., Lia graduated from Northwestern University in 2022.

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Sebastian Stan's Trump Biopic ‘The Apprentice’ Gets an Exciting Release Date Update

The biographical drama about Donald Trump also features performances from Maria Bakalova and Martin Donovan.

The Big Picture

• Abbasi's new film, The Apprentice , follows Donald Trump's early real estate career.
• The movie stars Sebastian Stan as Trump.
• Abbasi teased when the film might release during the press confrence at Cannes.

It’s hard to escape seeing Donald Trump’s name in the headlines as his latest court case plays out on news stations across the nation and time marches on to the November election. Although some may have had their fill of seeing the businessman-turned-politician’s name everywhere, filmmaker Ali Abbasi is grateful for the free marketing. The director’s latest project, The Apprentice , will follow the former President’s blossoming real estate career in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s with Sebastian Stan stepping into the shoes of the controversial figure . The production celebrated its world premiere on Monday at the Cannes Film Festival and, during a press conference that followed, which was attended by Collider’s Steve Weintraub , Abbassi shared some quippy remarks about when audiences can expect to see his biographical drama on the big screen.

“We have a promotional event coming up called [the] U.S. election that’s going to help us with the movie. So we’re hoping very much that it can come out - if I’m remembering right - the second debate’s going to be on September 15 , something like that. So that’s a good release date for us I would say.”

Along with Stan, the movie will also feature performances from Jeremy Strong ( Succession ) as Roy Cohn, Maria Bakalova ( Borat Subsequent Moviefilm ) as Ivana Trump, Martin Donovan ( Simple Men ) as Fred Trump, and Joe Pingue ( The Book of Eli ) as Anthony Salerno. Primarily, the plot will center itself around the growing relationship between Trump and Cohn as the pair grow their friendship with Cohn taking Trump under his wing.

Ali Abbasi Steps Out Of His Comfort Zone With ‘The Apprentice’

Abbasi has already won over audiences and peers with his exquisite work behind titles like 2018’s Swedish-language fantasy flick Border and the 2022 Persian-language crime thriller, Holy Spider but he says The Apprentice is something totally different. While responding to a question from Weintraub regarding the editing process, Abbasi said:

“I’ve been hearing so much that I make slow movies with deliberate pacing that I was like ‘I’m going to make a f---ing fast movie.’ [Laughs] I have to. And I think it’s in the nature of this movie, in the manic nature of this character and this world and universe, it has to have that manic pace . It has to feel short.”

Stay tuned to Collider for more information on Abbasi’s The Apprentice and more coverage over the duration of the Cannes Film Festival . You can check out the full press conference above.

The Last Stop in Yuma County Review: Western Thriller Brings Cool Chaos to a Diner

Starring Jim Cummings and a handful of familiar faces, writer-director Francis Galluppi creates a unique neo-Western with fun little twists and turns.

Quick Links

Some guys walk into a diner... jocelin donahue's diner, jim cummings is a star.

There's a rare type of film that breaks halfway through or so, where the story we've been following suddenly shifts into something totally unexpected, or outright cuts to new characters completely. Of course, Alfred Hitchock's Psycho is famous for this, and it seems to be most prominent in horror films like that — Audition, One Cut of the Dead, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Empty Man , and Zach Cregger's recent film, Barbarian. Now add Francis Galluppi's feature film debut, the deliciously tense Western thriller, The Last Stop in Yuma County , which has finally hit the masses this week. Its success on the festival circuit led to Galluppi being tapped to helm one of the next installments in the timeless Evil Dead franchise .

The great director Jim Cummings ( Thunder Road, The Beta Test ) stars in the film alongside the wonderful Jocelin Donahue ( I Trapped the Devil, Doctor Sleep ) and the legendary Richard Brake (who also starred in the aforementioned Barbarian ). They're all excellent in this unpredictable, atmospheric, and extremely entertaining new movie.

The Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)

• Cummings is reliably solid in the leading role
• Richard Brake and Jocelin Donahue hold their own in gripping supporting roles
• Unique blend of genres of subgenres
• More starpower would have made this more accessible to the masses
• The final moments are a bit of a letdown compared to the rest of the twisty plot

It's fair to say your movie is off to an edgy start with the reliably excellent Jim Cummings starring as — yes — a knife salesman. Given the actor-filmmaker's tendency to portray occasionally violent antics on screen, as evidenced in indie gems like Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow , your mind might soar in a particular direction knowing his character in The Last Stop (who is never named, mind you) sells a certain sharp object for a living. It's just one of the several red herrings and purposeful misdirections in this lovely little neo-Western that keeps you guessing all the way through .

Hearing the film's title might jog one's memory of the classic Western 3:10 to Yuma , which was later remade with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. The Last Stop in Yuma County is also set in Arizona, but in a quasi-modern setting — though it's all deliciously retro as we watch a colorful ensemble of characters trickle into a peaceful diner after the nearby gas station taps out and is left waiting for the long-delayed fill-up truck to arrive.

Into the diner walks the knife salesman (Cummings), as well as a pair of blatant crooks on the run: the ever-so-still and terrifying Beau (Brake) alongside the younger and hotheaded Travis ( I Care a Lot standout, Nicholas Logan) . Donahue is excellent throughout as she interacts with a variety of different personality types.

The timeless character actor Faizon Love ( Elf ) plays Vernon, the jovial gas station manager who pops in sporadically, and the whole show is run by the diner's well-to-do but timid server Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), whose hillbilly husband Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.) happens to be the sheriff across town. That is, when he's not busy giving his goodhearted deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) a hard time around the workplace.

The Clint Eastwood Western-Thriller That Inspired Taylor Sheridan to Create Yellowstone

Given all these strangers on the scene, leave it to a local — a.k.a. Pete, played by Jon Proudfoot — to waltz in and stir up trouble after Charlotte has already realized that her establishment is housing more than one criminal at the moment. Shootouts ensue, and bodies drop, but the finest moments come from the incredibly unnerving tension that immaculately builds up until these Tarantino-esque explosions of chaos .

There are also plenty of dryly humorous moments , particularly between the seemingly clueless sheriff who can't piece together that his wife is acting strangely over the phone because she's stuck in a hostile diner with a gun hypothetically pointed at her head. The possibilities here are endless, as a few other side characters trickle in to further complicate the matters at hand, as bank robbers Beau and Travis realize folks are starting to recognize them as the publicized crooks who just escaped from a heist in another part of the state.

Jim Cummings on New Film The Last Stop in Yuma County and the Future of Cinema

Fans of Cummings' charm and wit might be bummed during the middle chunk of the film, since his character is sidelined for the sake of other, perhaps more pressing plot points at work, but fret not: He has at least several moments to shine here. Yes, he's just a star of the film and not working behind the camera in any way — but that's A-OK. Writer-director Galluppi proves here he's a future force to be reckoned with in Hollywood, even if the conclusion of this feature debut loses its steam, especially in comparison to the rest of the thrilling storyline .

From Well Go USA, The Last Stop in Yuma County is now playing in theaters and available on digital.

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Tearful kevin costner unveils western gamble ‘horizon’ at cannes: “sorry you had to clap so long”.

The director-star put $20 million of his own money into the project, which received a roughly ten-minute standing ovation at the fest.

By Aaron Couch , Georg Szalai May 19, 2024 12:32pm

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Kevin Costner rode into Cannes with cowboy swagger, making finger pistols on the red carpet to cheers from the crowd ahead of the premiere for Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 , a partially self-financed western that is one of the biggest swings of his long career.

Inside the Grand Lumiere Theatre, Costner was greeted with extended applause (including from some guests wearing cowboy hats) before the first public screening of the $90 million-plus budgeted film that is planned as part one of a four-part saga.

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“I’m sorry you had to clap so long for me to speak,” Costner told the crowd, adding of the movie, “It’s not mine anymore. It’s yours. I knew that the minute this was over. And that’s the way it should be.”

Continued Costner: “I think movies aren’t about their opening weekends, they are about their lives. And about how many times you are willing to share it. And I hope you do share this movie with your sweethearts, with your children.”

Since directing and starring in best picture winner Dances with Wolves , Costner has become synonymous with the western genre, and emerged as one of its biggest champions. He was one of the first A-list movie stars to jump to TV with the miniseries Hatfields & McCoys in 2012, before such a film-to-TV move became commonplace. And more notably, he has led the ratings juggernaut Yellowstone for five seasons, with the fate of the second half of season five hanging in the balance. ( Yellowstone producers have claimed Costner’s Horizon schedule had made him unavailable for the show, while Costner’s camp has blamed writing delays on the Yellowstone end.)

Costner is banking on his Yellowstone crowd showing up for Horizon . In a bold move, the first two parts will come out in close succession, with Chapter 1 arriving in North America on June 28 and Chapter 2 coming in August. Warner Bros. is handling domestic distribution, but does not have financial skin in the game.

Though the Cannes crowd seemed to like the film, The Hollywood Reporter chief film critic David Rooney was not high on it, writing, “ Kevin Costner  has been in the saddle long enough to know the difference between a big-screen feature Western like  Dances With Wolves , a miniseries like  Hatfields & McCoys  or a longform like  Yellowstone . All those projects have done well by him and he’s done well by them. His connection to the quintessential Americana genre and the rugged lands it calls home is indubitable. So why is his sprawling new frontier tale,  Horizon: An American Saga , such a clumsy slog? It plays like a limited series overhauled as a movie, but more like a hasty rough cut than a release ready for any format.”

As for the future of Horizon , Costner ended his remarks by promising the crowd there are three more films coming. Said the actor: “It’s just another miracle in my life. I hope this time was worth it for you.”

May 19, 1:22 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Universal was handling international rights on Horizon.

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