Films in this library shot in New Mexico, a state whose landscape and incentives made it a standing double for the Southwest. 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 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…
New MexicoSilverado (1985) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lawrence Kasdan made a Western in a decade that had stopped making them, assembled four leads before any of them were famous, and built it out of every convention…
MontanaLonesome Dove (1989) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Six and a half hours of television that does what almost no Western film has room for, which is to follow a cattle drive long enough that the…
ColoradoButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. William Goldman sold the screenplay for four hundred thousand dollars and the film is a comedy about two men becoming obsolete. The freeze frame…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
CaliforniaIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A hundred and eighty-five million dollars, seven hundred and ninety million back, and it is still the film that damaged the…
New MexicoMatt Reeves remakes Let the Right One In with care and conviction. Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence.
New MexicoJohn Carpenter turns vampire hunting into blue-collar work and James Woods carries the whole film. That choice is the film.
CaliforniaChristopher Nolan's 2023 Manhattan Project biopic. Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer.
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