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Filming Location: New Mexico

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.

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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Four men in Western attire stand together in a desert landscape, representing the film's ensemble cast of Kevin Kline, ScottNew Mexico

Silverado (1985) Review

Silverado (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…

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Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones stand together in period Western clothing during a cattle drive scene. TITLE: LonesomeMontana

Lonesome Dove (1989) Review

Lonesome 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…

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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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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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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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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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Let Me In (2010) film posterNew Mexico

Let Me In (2010)

Matt 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.

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Vampires (1998) film posterNew Mexico

Vampires (1998)

John Carpenter turns vampire hunting into blue-collar work and James Woods carries the whole film. Not a calling, not a tragic destiny, not a brooding romance with the dark.

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