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Watch out — it looks like we're in for another revival of the Western.

Declarations of such a revival gushed forth from Twitter earlier this week after movie critics and Oscar prognosticators in New York and Los Angeles got their first look at "The Revenant," the much-anticipated follow-up for director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who directed last year's Best Picture winner, "Birdman."

The movie (which I and most critics outside the two major media markets have not seen yet) is set in the American frontier, around 1823, and tells a tale of revenge by a trapper (Leonardo DiCaprio) left for dead by his colleagues (led by Tom Hardy) after a bear attack.

Early praise has been heaped on DiCaprio, considered a sure thing for an Oscar nomination, and the cinematography (by Emanuel Lubezki, who has won two years in a row now, for "Birdman" and "Gravity").

Stretching for a wider meaning, some writers have taken the existence of "The Revenant" — and another awards-season entry, Quentin Tarantino's bounty-hunter tale "The Hateful Eight" — as a sign that the Western, that most American of movie genres, is back.

If this sounds at all familiar, it's because the "Westerns are back" mantra rises every time some well-known filmmaker has success at the genre.

It happened in 1992, when Clint Eastwood made "Unforgiven," which won the Best Picture Oscar. It happened in 1990, when Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves" won multiple awards. It happened in the '80s with "Silverado" (1985) and "Young Guns" (1988) — films that actually stanched the bleeding of "the Western is dead" declaration prompted by Michael Cimino's bloated 1980 Western "Heaven's Gate."

This latest trend-spotting of a Western revival is also a few months late. This spring brought us two unusual takes on the Western, Kristian Levring's shoot-out thriller "The Salvation" and John Maclean's road drama "Slow West."

Those movies, along with "The Revenant," point out a fascinating aspect of the modern Western: They are often made by directors outside the United States. (Levring is Danish, Maclean is Scottish, and Iñárritu is from Mexico.) Perhaps making a Western is one way for an outsider to comment on or try to grasp this strange concept that is America.

There's another movie that needs to be mentioned in this conversation about Westerns, and that's "Bone Tomahawk."

If you haven't heard of "Bone Tomahawk," it's not your fault. It's being released by a small distributor and has played in only a few markets since it opened Oct. 23. No theater in the Salt Lake City area has screened it, and it's available here only through video-on-demand services.

The movie only caught my attention because my fellow movie critic at City Weekly, Scott Renshaw, enthused about it on Twitter. I gave it a look, and my reaction can be summed up in three words: Hoe. Lee. Crap.

"Bone Tomahawk" centers on a sheriff (Kurt Russell) and an injured cowboy (Patrick Wilson) who must lead a posse into the wilds, where a group of cave-dwelling cannibals has taken the cowboy's young wife (Lili Simmons) and one of the sheriff's deputies (Evan Jonigkeit) as hostages and/or dinner. The posse includes the sheriff's aged backup deputy (Richard Jenkins) and a dapper gentleman (Matthew Fox) who boasts a ruthless efficiency at killing "savages."

Writer-director S. Craig Zahler, who also co-wrote the movie's score, has never directed a movie before, but you wouldn't know that from watching "Bone Tomahawk." He captures the stark beauty and sudden brutality of the Old West. He gives Wilson and Fox, two actors I usually find stiff, the meatiest roles of their careers, and they run with them. He gets some serious bad-ass moves out of Russell and strong comic relief from Jenkins.

Zahler also knows his Western movies. The story here is reminiscent, in a good way, of "The Searchers" — if John Ford also made disturbingly gory horror films. Make no mistake, there are some scenes of horrific violence that will send the squeamish scurrying for the remote.

So far, "Bone Tomahawk" has been well received by those few who have seen it. It premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September and has earned high marks on Meteoritic and Rotten Tomatoes. And, on Tuesday, the movie received Independent Spirit Award nominations for Zahler's screenplay and for Jenkins' supporting performance.

"Bone Tomahawk" sets down a marker for "The Revenant" and "The Hateful Eight" to match. If they can, this Western revival might be real, after all.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.