Will Penny
Directed by Tom Gries
1968
Charlton Heston called it his own best film and almost nobody saw it: an illiterate middle-aged cowhand with no property and no prospects, and the frontier offers him nothing.
★ 1.6
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
The Gunfighter
Directed by Henry King
1950
Gregory Peck plays the fastest gun alive as an exhausted man who wants a quiet drink: every revisionist western owes the premise, and Zanuck blamed the mustache for the box office.
★ 3.0
The Big Country
Directed by William Wyler
1958
Jerome Moross wrote the score American westerns have been quoting ever since: a sea captain arrives in Texas and refuses to prove anything to anybody, which nobody there can forgive.
★ 3.0
Three Amigos
Directed by John Landis
1986
Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short play silent film stars mistaken for real gunfighters: a Mexican village hires them in earnest, and the singing bush is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
★ 3.0
Silverado
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
1985
Lawrence Kasdan set out to prove the western was not dead and assembled half of Hollywood: four men ride into a town run by the wrong sheriff, and the pleasures are entirely traditional.
★ 3.2
The Naked Spur
Directed by Anthony Mann
1953
Five people and a mountain, and no town or fort anywhere in it: Anthony Mann pushed James Stewart into playing a bounty hunter with nothing likable left, shot entirely outdoors.
★ 3.4
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1973
Bob Dylan wrote the score, appears in it, and gave the world Knockin on Heaven's Door: MGM cut Peckinpah's version to pieces, and the restoration is a great elegiac western.
★ 3.6
The Shootist
Directed by Don Siegel
1976
John Wayne's last film has him playing a gunfighter running out of time, which he knew he was: Don Siegel shot it plainly, and the whole genre says goodbye at once.
★ 3.8
Little Big Man
Directed by Arthur Penn
1970
Made during Vietnam and aimed straight at it: a 121-year-old man narrates his life across the frontier, and Arthur Penn makes the cavalry the villains for once.
★ 4.2
Tombstone
Directed by George P. Cosmatos
1993
Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday is the reason people keep rewatching it: the film lost its director a month into shooting and still produced the most quotable western since the sixties.
★ 4.6
Dances With Wolves
Directed by Kevin Costner
1990
Costner directed it himself, shot a third of it in Lakota with subtitles, and everyone expected disaster: a Union officer posted to an empty frontier fort starts keeping company with his neighbors.
★ 5.3
Lone Star
Directed by John Sayles
1996
Sayles moves between past and present without a cut, panning from one decade into another: a Texas border town excavates a forty-year-old murder and finds the whole town's history attached.
★ 6.1
For a Few Dollars More
Directed by Sergio Leone
1965 · Italy
Leone found the shape of his westerns here: two bounty hunters circle each other for two hours, a musical pocket watch counts down the duel, and Morricone times the whole film.
★ 6.1
My Darling Clementine
Directed by John Ford
1946
Ford claimed Wyatt Earp himself described the gunfight to him: what stays with people is not the shootout but a church dance on a bare wooden floor under an unfinished roof.
★ 6.3
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1976
Eastwood fired the director and took over, and the union wrote a rule to stop it happening again: a Missouri farmer rides out after the war and keeps collecting strays he never wanted.
★ 6.5
A Fistful of Dollars
Directed by Sergio Leone
1964 · Italy
The spaghetti western became a genre with this, and Clint Eastwood became a star: Ennio Morricone's whistle, a poncho and a cheroot, and a drifter who tells nobody what he wants.
★ 6.5
The Magnificent Seven
Directed by John Sturges
1960
Kurosawa liked this remake of his own film enough to send Sturges a ceremonial sword: Seven Samurai relocated to the Mexican border, with Elmer Bernstein's theme doing half the work.
★ 6.6
Blazing Saddles
Directed by Mel Brooks
1974
Brooks spent years saying it could not be made today and has since changed his mind: a Black sheriff arrives in a frontier town built on racism, and everybody gets hit.
★ 6.9
True Grit
Directed by Coen Brothers
2010
The Coens went back to Charles Portis's actual sentences and rationed contractions almost out of existence: a fourteen-year-old girl hires a drunk marshal to avenge her father.
★ 7.0
Red River
Directed by Howard Hawks
1948
Ford said he never knew Wayne could act until he saw this: a cattle drive turns into a mutiny, and the man in charge becomes the thing to escape.
★ 7.0