5 classic Kevin Costner movies you should see while waiting for more Yellowstone (and 5 hidden gems you may have missed)
If you're a John Dutton fan, you need to add these Costner films to your watchlist
Film Features Kevin Costner
Before Yellowstone and the role of John Dutton made him one of the highest-paid actors on TV, Kevin Costner was one of Hollywood’s most successful movie stars. A string of hits in the late 1980s to early 1990s put Costner on the map, and his Best Picture and Best Director Oscar wins for 1990’s Dances With Wolves solidified his place on Hollywood’s rarified A-List. While some of his movies were instant classics (think The Untouchables), others fell somewhere between monster hits (Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves) and blockbuster guilty pleasures (The Bodyguard). As Yellowstone fans wait for season five to resume this summer, here are five classic Costner movies, followed by five underrated Costner gems, that you should watch before the Duttons return.
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Wyatt Earp is the best Costner movie
Tin Cup and Open Range were on cable like every day in the 2000s. Don’t see how they qualify as “hidden gems.” so much as “here are 5 other good Costner movies.” I was going to make jokes about the “real” hidden gems, but the fact that The War isn’t on here is criminal. That is a fine, fine movie in which Costner is great.
Tim Cup always felt like a pale imitation of Bull Durham to me. The quippiness felt forced, less organic than the interactions between the characters in BD. It’s plenty entertaining but ultimately not in the same league. Meanwhile BD is probably the greatest baseball movie ever made, at least with comedic elements involved.
I mean, I disagree about Bull Durham and Tin Cup being the same movie, but I love golf – the plots are extremely similar. I’ve had the BD as a great baseball movie debate years ago with my college roommates. We got to where we didn’t think BD was even the best Costner baseball movie. Being Tigers fans, we loved For Love of the Game more, and Field of Dreams is so much bigger and more interesting than either movie. We decided that Major League was the vastly superior baseball movie, surpassing Eight Men Out because ML is funnier.
Eight Men Out is clearly the best baseball drama, and what a cast. ML is definitely funnier than BD (I just watched it again this weekend, a true classic) but as wildly entertaining as it is, not grounded in any sort of reality. Bull Durham hits the sweet spot for me. Hilarious, but in service to a story as old as sports and with baseball central to the lives of the characters.Field of Dreams isn’t really a baseball movie to me; it’s about fandom, family and our ties to the past with baseball as the delivery vehicle. For Love of the Game is fine but doesn’t make my roster.
Best baseball movie, at least comedy, is the original Bad News Bears imho.
This is an acceptable answer
I can watch endlessly the two clips where Crash tells the other team’s batter what the next pitch will be. And the bus scene.
“He hit the fucking bull! Guy gets a free steak!” is a great rub-in line. I think Crash Davis is Costner’s best character.I would say the “you’re a cocksucker” scene with the umpire is my second-favorite, but when you throw in his intro to Nuke outside the bar (“from what I hear you couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a fucking boat”), him pushing Trey Turner into finally confronting his team (“Larry?” “Lollygaggers.” “Lollygaggers.”), the in-game discussion about what to get the rube marrying the team trampoline for their wedding, and Crash drunk in the pool hall when Nuke comes to tell him he’s been promoted, there’s no real way to rank them. Just a perfect movie.
Love Love Love Love Love me some Silverado. Endlessly quotable. Watch it at least once a year. And it’s not the greatest, but I’ve got a soft spot for the third movie in his baseball trilogy, For Love of the Game.
I unabashedly love For Love of the Game. It’s got problems, but I still get caught up in all of its cheesy, saccharine, over-earnestness every time I see it. “We’re gonna be awesome for you right now!”
Silverado may not get much airtime today but as a child of the 80s I can confirm every guy I knew absolutely loved it. Kevin Kline as a believably menacing quick draw artist is a high point.
Danny Glover is also in Silverado. I mean, he is on the poster.
“Yankees Fans. (Eyeroll.) ”It’s got its cheesy moments and Steve Lyons’ babbling color screws up an erstwhile performance by Scully (which was doubly jarring as Scully had not had a partner since he was doing the NBC games in the 80s and Lyons was perhaps the worst possible choice among the analyst pool), but they’re offset by the hilarious – the bus ride after picking up Jena Malone immediately comes to mind – and touching ones.The deleted scenes show an smart editing decision to take out a scene with Kelly Preston later blowing up at him about how they met (“I don’t fuck like that!”) which I think was a good choice as there’s no need – there’s enough in there so that the audience ends up inferring that about her character later.The other interesting thing about this is that this is one of the rare instances where the movie really improves on the book. I picked it up shortly after; it was so bad I ended up immediately donating it.
Silverado is amazing.
The shootout at the end of Open Range is so, so good. There’s no ballet of bullets, it’s just brutal and hateful and chaotic, and largely filmed from the perspective of townspeople just trying not to get killed. It gives me goosebumps every time. That is such an underrated movie. Robert Duvall is absolutely terrific in it.
Open Range is really well done and kind of unique. The gunfights aren’t really like anything else in westerns, how chaotic they are
Drives home Charley’s point about how the fighters aren’t guys who do this all the time. They’re cowboys, not professional gunfighters, except for Kim Coates and Kevin Costner. They’re scared of getting shot, and they act accordingly.
This exactly!
And even Coates isn’t expecting what Costner brings him in that last scene. In most westerns there would be a mutual draw there and the faster man would win. That movie seemingly came and went from theaters and I first caught it on a weekend afternoon on TNT or something. I was blown away how good it was.
Yeah, I always liked that they eschewed the typical duel. The guy needed to die for personal satisfaction, sure, but he also needed to be dead right away if Charley and Boss were going to have any chance of surviving the fight. Honor schmonor. Butler had none, and didn’t deserve a chance to defend himself.
You can call Boss Bluebonnet.
I thought it was made for tv.
Add me to those who love Open Range. It was one of my best theater experiences in years, because I went in not knowing anything about it (rare in the internet age). My wife and I just decided to add a random movie to a dinner date, and I was transfixed for the next two hours. I love westerns, and Open Range is one of the best of the modern era.Everything about the final fight is indeed great,-including the sound. Somehow those booming shots and the splintering wood are louder and harsher than in any other movie. It is fantastic. Goosebumps indeed.Silverado is also great for all you youngsters out there who haven’t seen it-for very different reasons!
Dean McDermott is better known for his marriage to Tori Spelling than his acting these days, but his performance as Benning’s brother in Open Range is top notch.
I was surprised to see Open Range listed as a “hidden gem”, since it seemed to be on TV all the time at one point. I saw it in theaters, mainly because I in my pre-fatherhood days, I never missed a western. TV really lost some of the scope of those early scenes of Costner, Duvall and… that other guy who was on ER, trying to find shelter from the rain while herding their cattle.The only downside of the film is that it can’t decide when it wants to end.
I’m glad Thirteen Days finally showed up right at the end of the list. It’s a great movie on its own merits, the Greenwood/Culp performances are perfect, and Costner’s quite serviceable if you are generous in spirit about his accent. Definitely a good watch.
I guess you could say you give it a high grade on YAH REPAHT CAHD
Wicked high!
Best fictional Kennedy I’ve seen. Managed to capture the real Kennedy’s actual physical frailty (which was in stark contrast to the youthful vigor he trying to present) as he’s ground down by the situation.
I need to rewatch 13 days…last time I saw it was when it premiered, and I only saw it because of the LOTR teaser that was premiering alongside with it ( the days before You tube and 4 hours to download a trailer via 56 Kbps )
Although it was produced by Beacon Films, then run by Kevin O’Donnell. Which explains why Thirteen Days gave Costner’s O’Donnell far more importance than he did historically (Kevin thought standard histories of the Cuban Missile Crisis ignored his dad) https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20010204&slug=odonnell
Ha, that does make sense. I actually just finished reading a deep-dive moment-by-moment history of the CMC, and the author (a cheeky Brit, which made his observations fun in certain spots) actually specifically noted the point at which O’Donnell became essentially irrelevant to the rest of the crisis, and contrasted it to his treatment in this movie!
Leaving Mr. Brooks off the list is a travesty. Watching him slice Dane Cook’s throat open with a shovel is the best Costner moment in cinematic history.
I mean who among us?
Having to scroll this far down the comments section before someone mentions this gem is the real travesty! Hats off to you.
Ha, I remember when I was moving into my condo for law school. My parents and I were out shopping for furnishings and all that stuff, and my dad saw a copy of Open Range at Wal-Mart and he was like this is a great movie! And then we bought it and he was thrilled.Anyway, no Bodyguard? wtf.
Alternate title:Here’s yet another topic in slideshow format that shouldn’t be.Sorry, but AV Club and GMG as a whole has gone seriously overboard with slideshows in the last month. This is getting out of hand. It’s obvious that the Herbs and Spices are playing a role and it seems like there are no topics that are safe. Please stop (at least to this extent), it’s only going to push more people away.
A Perfect World is low-key the best Costner movie and probably Eastwood’s most underrated masterpiece. Full stop.
Man he really had a great run, like late 80s on through Waterworld maybe?
Waterworld is unfairly maligned, mostly because of its spiraling budget. It knows exactly what a ridiculous movie it is, and is fun as hell to watch.
ETA: Looking at his IMDB he never really hit a string of misfires until after Mr. Brooks in 2007, which was 12 years after Waterworld. I didn’t see much of his work for a while but then he turns up in Hidden Figures and Molly’s Game in 2016/2017 before starting Yellowstone in 2018. For a guy who started his career in the early 80s that’s pretty damn strong.
Agreed, and it’s ridiculous (and kind of sad) that anyone who wasn’t paying for it gave a shit about all that budget stuff in the first place. It was a perfectly serviceable post-apocalyptic movie with some very good setpieces.
Unlike his followup The Postman (Mailworld), which squandered the opportunity it had with adapting the excellent book.
Not to mention Tom Petty.
Alas, I can’t find the old Vanity Fair article, but they did an extensive thing where they broke down how Waterworld was caught up in a fight between some big players (like Spielberg) in Hollywood and Matsushita, the then-new owners of Universal. I wish I could find it to confirm the details, but essentially it was someone (my brain says Spielberg but I can’t remember for sure) wanted out from their Universal contract, and normal practice would’ve been that this request would be granted. The new Japanese bosses, however, believed a contract was a contract and expected Spielberg or whoever to fulfill the terms. Folks at Universal rebelled by billing all sorts of nonsense to Waterworld in protest.I swear I’m not inventing this lol. Wish I could find it.
I mean, it’s basically an aquatic Mad Max movie, right? What’s wrong with that?
That’s precisely what it was, and what it was clearly going for. Right down to the fact that the resources that are still available years after the fall make very little sense. At least the oil tanker in WW could refine its own gas. Entire motorhead gangs rampaging in Road Warrior, when Max is first shown mopping up drops of fuel? His supercharger would run him out of gas in a few hours. Don’t. Care.
I will die on the hill of Waterworld being a good movie.
I won’t join you, but I will contribute to your quest, since it is an enjoyable movie.
There were no hills in Waterworld…
I will die on the hill of The Postman being a good movie
i will help you defend that hill.
I will die on the hill of WYATT EARP being far superior to TOMBSTONE.Yeah, I said it.
As a western fan, I agree with you. Tombstone is too much of a 90s action movie for me. I still like Gunfight at the OK Corral as the best Wyatt Earp film.
Tin Cup is a hidden gem? I though it was pretty well-regarded as one of Costner’s best performances.I couldn’t stand Field of Dreams or Dances With Wolves.
I feel like Dances With Wolves would be a much better movie without Costner’s character—or McDonnell’s. I genuinely enjoy Graham Greene, Tantoo Cardinal, Rodney A. Grant, and Wes Studi in the movie and would have happily watched 3 hours of just them, without Costner and McDonnell’s distracting, anachronistic mullets.
Yeah, I seem to recall both Tin Cup and that other “hidden gem” Open Range being on TV quite often for periods of time.
Few thoughts not reflected in other comments:Great pull on No Way Out. A movie that earned its twist ending rather than just using it as an “Oh Shit!” gimmick.Tin Cup is hardly a hidden gem, and doesn’t really stack up compared to his classics (including the far superior Bull Durham. Sorry Rene Russo, you did bring the heat). Replace it with Fandango, which may be the best end-of-college movie I’ve seen. A bunch of my friends and I watched it the week before graduation and were gutted. Ignore the trailer, it doesn’t reflect the pathos of the film AT ALL (the main characters are soon-to-be Texas grads about to be shipped to Vietnam in 1972). Open Range has grown to be one of my favorite modern westerns and it’s refreshing to see a gunfight that realistically depicts how hard it is to hit anything at all with a pistol when you’re running around or hiding behind something. Just mayhem in the streets.
Thank you! I am a huge fan of the movie “Fandango”. Discovered it the year before I went to college back in the late 80s, and introduced it to several of my friends. Even today, no one I know now has never heard of it (although the TV show “Archer” had a DOM Easter Egg in one of it’s episodes.
You are both correct about “Fandango.” A really good movie. “You know what I like best about Texas? Its shape.”No Way Out is terrific; the Untouchables is not. Saw Dances with Wolves on a weekend in Baraboo Wisconsin when it came out, in a massive theater on a Saturday night. It really felt like the olden days watching a movie on such a big screen in a packed theater. Pretty sure the theater is gone now.
Fandango is a dead-set classic. I grew up hanging around parachute drop-zones and thanks to it’s hilarious skydiving scene, it was almost guaranteed to be playing on the VHS whenever we had bad weather days
I expected Fandango to make this list. Haven’t watched it in a long time. I think I recorded it on VHS a million years ago.
Pretty sure the copy my friend had was ripped off from Blockbuster.
I love No Way Out. Although as someone who has lived in the DC area off and on for the past 25 years, it gets a lot of grief here for the scene where Costner’s character rushes to the “Georgetown” Metro station, which 1) Doesn’t exist; the closest Metro station to Georgetown is Foggy Bottom, nearly a mile away 2) Was obviously filmed in the Baltimore subway system — neither the trains nor the station look how DC ones do (although the DC metro is notorious for not letting film crews film there).
Ha, yeah I’ve heard similar jabs from friends who live there. Georgetown is famous for not having a metro stop. My wife lived there one summer while working an internship off one of the Dupont Circle spokes and by the time she made her way there from Georgetown was a sweaty mess every day.
Oh, man. “A Perfect World.” I saw that movie in the theaters back in,
(checks notes), well….a long time ago. And I really liked it! Don’t
think I’ve thought about it in decades, but, yeah that’s an Eastwood and
Costner underrated gem for sure!
OMG the “I believe” monologue in Bull Durham as delivered by a minor league catcher is absolutely stupefyingly blecch blecch blecch-topically cringeworthily ridiculous-ly badOther than that the mystifyingly obtusely absurd ending of Field of Dreams is pretty ridiculous too.
The book that Field of Dreams is based on is “Shoeless Joe,” by WP Kinsella. Its a pretty good and weird book. Spoiler alert, as I recall the book ends with some people being able to see the old timey players and some not.
Also instead of a fictional author as in the movie, the book features J.D. Salinger as a character. I bet the film studio never even asked him if he wanted to play himself (he was still alive; he died in 2010).
I had this book as assigned reading on three separate occasions during my schooling. Although I like the movie, Kinsella’s “baseball as religion” theme gets more annoying with each subsequent read, especially if you’re not really a fan of the sport.
Yeah. What does the first reporter do who shows up to interview all of these people lined up in their cars? I still like Burt Lancaster, though.
I think this one needs to be included:Directed by Oliver Stone, with Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kevin Bacon:It’s an entertaining yarn.
FANTASY
While it’s more of a supporting role for Costner, The Upside of Anger is well worth a watch if you’re in the mood for a rom-com that’s a little less than fluffy.
Why the hell is this website suddenly pushing Yellowstone down our throatsIs it not enough for it to be one of the most watched shows in the US, they need to make the Internet who hates it love it as well?
Whatever helps drive clicks and engagements, which you just helped feed.
And just as a reminder, women don’t get woolly. Nobody gets woolly.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves may be to Costner’s filmography what Hook is to Spielberg’s. If you saw both as a kid, you loved them, so it’s hard to be critically distant. I still say it’s a great movie.
Lets just call it an entertaining movie whose flaws become more apparent the older you get.
Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham is worth the price of admission alone.
that kid in the “perfect world” photo looks like a cartoon right?
And are we not going to talk about how they linked to the German-dubbed version of the Perfect World trailer?
Not great at all but These are fun
Replace Dances With Wolves with A Perfect World, directed by Clint Eastwood. Can’t believe that movie is not on this list.
with Field Of Dreams often duking it out with Bull Durham for “Best Baseball Movie Ever” status.I’m sorry, but the best baseball movie ever is Major League.“Is very bad to steal Jobu’s rum. Very bad.”
Yes. Haywood is a convicted felon, isn’t he Monty?Uh, it doesn’t really say here.Well, he should be.
He leads the league in all offensive categories, including nose hair.
“This guy threw at his own kid in a father-son game.”My personal favorite: “You trying to tell me Jesus Christ can’t hit a curveball?”
Mr. Baseball is my favourite baseball movie.But I won’t say that in front of Jobu.
I just saw Major League for the first time in decades a few days ago when I was at my parents for the holidays — it was on cable and my parents (in their 80s) still haven’t gotten into streaming.
Agreed. I grew up in Durham and went to many many Bulls games at the old DAP, so Bull Durham holds a very special place in my heart. That said, Major League is actually a true baseball movie, whereas Bull Durham is a romantic comedy that happens to be set around baseball.
I do not see much discussion about Dances With Wolves on here, if any Goodfellas fans want to chime in. It feels like How Green Was My Valley vs. Citizen Kane; it’s not like How Green Was My Valley wasn’t good, it was just less innovative. I think that there should be separate outdoor and indoor Oscar categories some years.
Was always a bigger Costner fan than a Cruise fan – King Kev was his nickname amongst my brothers and I, so great to see some appreciation for him here. Having said that, no one mention in the article or the comments about JFK?! Whatever your feelings on the movie it’s probably his best performance – the courtroom scenes alone are vintage stuff, his final closing speech where his voice cracks and breaks probably Costner’s finest acting moment. Plus, the “back and to the left” scene which leaves a whole courtroom silent left me with goosebumps as a teenager upon first viewing.
It’s easy to forget in the post-Waterworld era just how big of a platinum A-lister Costner was in the late 80s and early 90s, churning out one classic after another. Even Prince of Thieves was a smash hit and perfectly in line with the kind of entertainment people wanted and expected at the time.
I love Bull Durham. I’ve even sung the National Anthem at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (not the Durham Athletic Park, which is featured in the film and was where the Bulls played when it was made) before a Bulls game.I even integrated an exchange inspired by one of my favorite scenes from the movie into a script I wrote over the summer as an homage. It’s the one where the mound visit is taking too long and the bench coach comes out so they can get back to the game.I set up the curse and wedding gift (as well as the other issue to solve) in earlier scenes and used the authority figure’s entrance as the payoff.
Tin Cup is just such a perfect sports movie. It’s also the very rare bit of golf related entertainment to showcase characters and locales in the sport that are very underrepresented. (My formative time playing golf is much more aligned with a dusty run down rural driving range than a fancy private club.) Night and day compared to something like Bagger Vance, which explicitly tried to explain golf psychology and managed to say way less about it than Tin Cup did in just a few scenes.
alongside Robert Culp’s Robert Kennedy
I believe you mean Steven Culp. Although, a 70-year old Robert Culp playing RFK would’ve been an interesting choice.
Hidden Gem: The Postman. Come on, co starts Tom Petty, no less.
It might be somewhere in the comments already, but part of the Waterworld backlash came from movie critics who thought it was audacious for (what they perceived as) a lightweight actor writing/directing/producing/starring in Dances with Wolves (which had its own budget issues) and preemptively started calling it “Kevin’s Gate,” then got their collective asses handed to them. So they doubled down on Waterworld.
“…a Cold War edition of The West Wing, but with bigger (and real-life) stakes.”And fewer ”one egg is un oeuf” jokes.