Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Wild Horse Nine:
The Banshees of Inisherin
Before he shipped two CIA men off to Easter Island, Martin McDonagh stranded Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on a fictional island off the Irish coast. The Banshees of Inisherin turns the sudden end of a friendship into something funny, cruel, and quietly devastating, with the Irish Civil War rumbling across the water as a reminder that small grudges and big ones grow from the same soil. It remains one of the best movies of 2022 and the clearest blueprint for McDonagh’s brand of gallows humor.
The Secret Agent
If the 1970s South American politics of Wild Horse Nine are what pulled you in, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is essential. Wagner Moura plays a man laying low in Recife during Brazil’s military dictatorship, and the film moves between paranoia, absurdist comedy, and genuine menace with total confidence. It is loose and sprawling by design, a crime epic that cares as much about atmosphere and memory as it does about plot.
Black Bag
Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag is a spy movie more interested in loyalty than gunfire. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play married intelligence officers forced to wonder whether the other is a traitor, and David Koepp’s script lets the tension play out over dinner parties and polygraph tests. It is lean, sleek, and very adult, exactly the kind of grown-up espionage story that pairs well with McDonagh’s wearier take on agency men.
Miller’s Crossing
Gabriel Byrne’s Tom Reagan spends Miller’s Crossing playing two Prohibition-era crime bosses against each other, never quite revealing where his loyalty lies. The Coen brothers’ gangster picture is all rapid-fire dialogue and moral fog, and it features an early Steve Buscemi turn that makes his casting in Wild Horse Nine feel like a homecoming of sorts. It remains one of the best Coen brothers movies.
Wolfs
Jon Watts’ Wolfs pairs George Clooney and Brad Pitt as rival fixers who get booked for the same job and spend one long night trying to out-professional each other. The two stars can do this kind of thing in their sleep, and at times it feels like they are, but the premise is a fun one. Like Rockwell and Malkovich’s mismatched operatives, the appeal is in watching two veterans bicker, posture, and size each other up while the night gets steadily worse.
No Country for Old Men
The Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy is a cat-and-mouse thriller where the violence arrives without warning and the jokes are bone-dry. Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is one of the great screen villains, while Tommy Lee Jones’ aging sheriff gives the film its melancholy sense of a world that has outrun the people trying to police it.
The Card Counter
Oscar Isaac plays a former military interrogator grinding out a quiet life at the blackjack table in Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter. It shares Wild Horse Nine’s interest in men carrying the weight of what their government asked them to do, and how long that guilt lingers once the job is over.
Ballad of a Small Player
Colin Farrell is a gambler burning through borrowed time and stolen money in Macau in Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player. The Netflix noir has the same feel for self-destructive men in exile, far from home and running out of road, and Farrell finds a lot of sad, funny texture in a character who refuses to admit he is losing.
Blood Simple
The Coen brothers’ debut is a Texas noir built on bad decisions, misunderstandings, and a sweaty private detective played to perfection by M. Emmet Walsh. Blood Simple is proof that a crime story can be pitch-black and still get laughs, the same balance McDonagh has chased his whole career.
The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme follows Benicio del Toro’s ruthless tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda as he dodges assassination attempts while trying to complete one last grand venture. It is lighter on its feet than Wild Horse Nine, but both films find comedy in men with dangerous secrets reckoning with mortality, and both are stacked with scene-stealing supporting players.
READ MORE: Movies Like The Secret Agent, Movies Like Black Bag
