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.
ArizonaThe 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.…
ArizonaThe 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…
ArizonaRio Bravo (1959) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Howard Hawks made it as a direct rebuttal to High Noon, which John Wayne called un-American because the marshal asks townspeople for help. It is a hangout film…
Arizona3:10 to Yuma (2007) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. James Mangold opens the story out, adds half an hour, gives the rancher a limp and a war record, and turns a chamber piece into a journey.…
Arizona3:10 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…
ArizonaNomadland (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…
ArizonaLittle 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…
AlaskaInto 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…
ArizonaEasy 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…
ArizonaThe 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…
ArizonaNatural 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…
ArizonaThe 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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