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Filming Location: Arizona

Films in this library shot in Arizona, a state whose desert and Monument Valley edge define the visual language of the western. Location data is sourced from Wikidata property P915, which records where a film was actually shot as distinct from where its story is set.

Clint Eastwood as Josey Wales in a cowboy hat and poncho, spitting tobacco and looking toward the horizon.Arizona

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Review

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A revenge Western that abandons the revenge about halfway through and becomes a film about a man accumulating a family he keeps trying to leave behind.…

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Seven gunfighters stand together in a dusty Western town street, armed and ready for battle.Arizona

The Magnificent Seven (2016) Review

The Magnificent Seven (2016) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Antoine Fuqua takes the same structure, casts it the way the American West really looked, and gives the villain a coherent economic argument. The last forty minutes…

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John Wayne and Dean Martin stand inside a jail cell in a scene from the 1959 Western film Rio Bravo. TITLE: Rio Bravo 1959Arizona

Rio Bravo (1959) Review

Rio Bravo (1959) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Howard Hawks made it as a direct rebuttal to High Noon, which he considered un-American because the marshal asks townspeople for help. It is a hangout film with…

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Russell Crowe as outlaw Wade and Christian Bale as rancher Dan Evans face off on a desert road during their journey to theArizona

3:10 to Yuma (2007) Review

3:10 to Yuma (2007) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. James Mangold opens the story out, adds an hour, gives the rancher a limp and a war record, and turns a chamber piece into a journey. Ben…

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Two men sit across from each other in a small hotel room, one in a chair, the other standing, in black and white.Arizona

3:10 to Yuma (1957) Review

3:10 to Yuma (1957) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A rancher takes two hundred dollars to hold an outlaw in a hotel room until a train arrives, and almost the entire film is the two of…

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Frances McDormand sits in the driver's seat of a van, looking out the windshield with a contemplative expression.Arizona

Nomadland (2020) Review

Nomadland (2020) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Frances McDormand lives in a van among real people playing themselves, and the film is at its best whenever she is listening. What it will not do is name…

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A worn 1971 Volkswagen bus packed with six people on a desert road heading toward California. TITLE: Little Miss SunshineArizona

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) Review

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Six people in a failing Volkswagen driving from Albuquerque to a children's beauty pageant in California. Every one of them has a private humiliation, and the film's…

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Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless stands in an Alaskan wilderness landscape with mountains and forest behind him.Alaska

Into the Wild (2007) Review

Into the Wild (2007) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Sean Penn adapts Krakauer's account of Chris McCandless walking into Alaska and dying there, and the film admires him considerably more than the book does. Hal Holbrook…

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Two men on motorcycles ride down a desert highway in the 1960s, the road stretching behind them toward distant mountains.Arizona

Easy Rider (1969) Review

Easy Rider (1969) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It invented the modern road movie and killed the counterculture's mythology in the same hundred minutes. The film is loose, self-indulgent and occasionally incoherent, and the ending is…

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Kevin Costner in a postal uniform stands in a post-apocalyptic landscape with mountains and dead towns in the background.Arizona

The Postman (1997) Review

The Postman (1997) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner turned a satirical novel about a con man into a three hour sincere epic about American institutions, and ended it with a statue of himself. It took…

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Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as Mickey and Mallory Knox in a scene from the 1994 film. TITLE: Natural Born KillersArizona

Natural Born Killers (1994) Review

Natural Born Killers (1994) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Oliver Stone made a satire about media appetite for violence that is itself a two-hour delivery system for violence. Tarantino wrote the story, disowned it, and asked…

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Charlie Sheen as radio astronomer Zane Zaminsky examining data on a computer screen in a darkened room.Arizona

The Arrival (1996) Review

The Arrival (1996) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A radio astronomer finds a signal and works out that the aliens landed decades ago and are quietly heating the planet to suit themselves. It cost twenty-five million…

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