Brokeback Mountain (2005) Review
Brokeback Mountain (2005) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two men herd sheep on a Wyoming mountain in 1963 and spend the next twenty years failing to have a life. Ang Lee won Best Director and the…
Genre: Western
Frontiers, outlaws, and the myth America filmed about itself. Western reviews from the classic era through the revisionists who answered it.
DramaGiant (1956) Review
Giant (1956) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three hours and twenty-one minutes of Texas across roughly twenty-five years, James Dean's last completed performance, and a film that starts as a marriage drama and ends as an…
DramaDances with Wolves (1990) Review
Dances with Wolves (1990) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a three-hour Western largely in Lakota with subtitles, which nobody wanted financed, and it made four hundred million dollars and beat Goodfellas. The film is…
AdventureTrue Grit (1969) Review
True Grit (1969) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Wayne finally won an Oscar for playing a fat, drunk, one-eyed marshal who shoots men in the back, and the performance works because he is willing to…
ActionThe Wild Bunch (1969) Review
The Wild Bunch (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Peckinpah cut the violence at multiple film speeds and assembled it at a rate nobody had attempted, and the result changed how every action film since has…
ActionThe 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.…
DramaThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Review
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Ford spent thirty years building the Western myth and then made the film that takes it apart, shot on a soundstage in black…
ActionThe 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…
ActionThe Magnificent Seven (1960) Review
The Magnificent Seven (1960) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai relocated to the Mexican border, shortened by an hour, and improved in one specific way. Every gunman gets an introduction that is also an…
ActionSilverado (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…
DramaRio 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 John Wayne called un-American because the marshal asks townspeople for help. It is a hangout film…
ActionOpen Range (2003) Review
Open Range (2003) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a slow, patient Western about two cattlemen who decide to kill a rancher, and then staged the best gunfight in the genre's last forty years. It…