“The only home I’ve ever known is on the back of a horse.” It’s the kind of line, a bit cool and a bit corny all at once, that you might expect to hear from a grizzled John Wayne type in a vintage B-western, perhaps while staring up at a vast, starry sky in the Texas desert. In Concrete Cowboy, however, it’s said by a bearded, squinting Idris Elba, with nary a tumbleweed in sight. We’re in the hard-up streets of present-day north Philadelphia, where his character, gruff ex-convict Harp, works at the famous Fletcher Street Stables – a nonprofit riding club where the city’s black urban horsemen gather, and underprivileged youths learn another way of life.

That unique real-life setting is what makes this Netflix original immediately compelling. Directed by newcomer Ricky Staub and produced by Lee Daniels and Elba himself, it’s a film that poignantly uses its unusual, out-of-time milieu to address a genre in which black people have usually been either invisible or peripheral. As its rather literal title indicates, Concrete Cowboy is an urban western of sorts, embedded in traditional themes of masculinity and morality, with less of an updated spin on them than you might guess. With his customary casual charisma, Elba plays a flawed hardman hero assigned to look after his troubled, estranged adolescent son (Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin) for a summer, using the healing power of horses – and other tropes of cowboy culture – to steer the kid toward the straight and narrow.

With a few adjustments, you could just about see Staub’s film playing out in the aged Hollywood register of Shane and True Grit, which is a large part of its charm. Harp’s anachronistic lifestyle is depicted with some degree of hokey, when-men-were-men romanticism, though there’s quiet power in reclaiming such nostalgia from a predominantly white avenue of storytelling. As for Elba, it does make you wish to see him in more westerns of any stripe: clad in denim, Stetson and kerchief, he couldn’t seem more at home on a horse.

Netflix’s release of the film comes coincidentally on the heels of the recent passing of Larry McMurtry, the novelist and screenwriter celebrated as a poet of the “anti-western” – separating the grandiose myth of the American west from its bleaker reality. He won an Oscar in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain (Amazon), the very tension of which emerged from the disparity between the old-school masculinity in which its two 1960s cowboys had been raised and the desire between them, which could only be allowed to function in a more modern world. The greatest of all McMurtry-based films, 1963’s Hud (Now TV), places its damaged eponymous protagonist (played by Paul Newman) on a similar precipice between archaic macho patriarchy and a frail, less forgiving future – his family’s ranch hanging in the balance.

I thought of both those McMurtry stories while watching Concrete Cowboy, though the newer film permits a greater glimmer of hope on the road ahead for the 21st-century cowpoke. Staub’s film would also make a fine, similarly titled double bill with the wonderful, undervalued Urban Cowboy (1980; Chili), which gave John Travolta one of his career-best roles as a dim-witted Texas country boy whose outdated idea of a man’s place in the world is tested when he moves to Houston and falls for a more feminist-minded cowgirl (a superb Debra Winger). Playing a bit like Saturday Night Fever with a honky-tonk country soundtrack in place of disco, it takes a comparatively rollicking view of the great American cowboy’s last stand.

A more sombre, elegiac portrait all round is to be found in 2017 film The Rider (BFI Player), from Chloé Zhao, director of this year’s Oscar favourite, Nomadland. In it, a rodeo king in South Dakota has a near fatal accident that effectively ends his career, prompting the greater symbolic question of what a cowboy is without his horse. Using her signature docufiction technique, Zhao draws an extraordinary, self-effacing performance from real-life Sioux bronco rider Brady Jandreau – staring at a long, uncertain future as the cowboy life he idolised fades into the sunset behind him.

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Synchronic
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Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead got some attention for their thoughtful 2017 sci-fi film The Endless. Their fine follow-up continues to probe complex ideas within the genre, but has largely flown under the radar. Jamie Dornan and Anthony Mackie star as New Orleans paramedics attending to a series of odd fatalities linked to a psychedelic designer drug, only to discover a stranger, time-bending truth.

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The Romanian auteur Cristi Puiu rarely gives audiences an easy time, but his latest work is his most oppressively challenging: a 200-minute cinderblock of dense philosophical verbiage, as an assortment of eastern European aristocrats gather one Christmas Eve to debate matters of politics, morality and warfare. If you’ve really missed dinner party discourse during the pandemic, it’ll certainly give your year’s worth.

Charulata
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One of Satyajit Ray’s greatest achievements gets the Criterion Collection treatment. This 1964 work is an exquisitely observed character study of a withdrawn housewife caught between her negligent newspaper editor husband and his poet cousin, who awakensher creative and emotional yearnings. It’s alive with broader political resonance beneath its closeup human detailing.