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.
Tender Mercies
Directed by Bruce Beresford
1983
Robert Duvall wrote and sang his own songs, then took Best Actor for the quietest work of his life: a broken country singer stops drinking at a Texas motel and stays.
★ 2.8
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
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
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
Giant
Directed by George Stevens
1956
James Dean died before it was finished and his last scenes had to be dubbed: three hours of Texas oil money, filmed as a family argument that runs thirty years.
★ 5.7
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
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
Rio Bravo
Directed by Howard Hawks
1959
Hawks made it as an argument against High Noon: instead of a marshal begging for help, four flawed men hold a jail and enjoy each other's company doing it.
★ 7.0
Stagecoach
Directed by John Ford
1939
It made John Wayne a star, invented Monument Valley as a place in the American mind, and put nine strangers in one coach: every road movie descends from it.
★ 7.0
Shane
Directed by George Stevens
1953
The western seen entirely through a small boy's worship, which is the honest way to look at it: a gunfighter tries to stop being one and cannot.
★ 7.1
East of Eden
Directed by Elia Kazan
1955
The only James Dean performance released while he was still alive: Steinbeck's Cain and Abel moved to a California lettuce valley, and Dean improvises his way through it.
★ 7.3
The Rider
Directed by Chloe Zhao
2017
Chloe Zhao cast a real rodeo rider and his real family to play themselves: the line between documentary and fiction never appears, and neither does a false note.
★ 7.3
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Directed by George Roy Hill
1969
Two men have never been better company on screen: Newman and Redford spend the film running out of frontier and enjoying each other far too much to panic.
★ 7.3
First Cow
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
2019
Reichardt makes the quietest films in American cinema, and this one is her warmest: two men on the Oregon frontier, one borrowed cow, and one very small crime.
★ 7.4
High Noon
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1952
Written as an allegory about the blacklist by a man about to be blacklisted: a marshal has eighty-five minutes before the noon train, and the film runs them in step.
★ 7.5
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Directed by John Ford
1962
Ford's last word on the myths he spent forty years building: it gave American English the phrase about printing the legend, and it is the bleakest western he made.
★ 7.6
Brokeback Mountain
Directed by Ang Lee
2005
It changed what a mainstream American film could be about: Lee filmed twenty years of two men unable to say what they are, almost entirely in silence.
★ 7.7
Unforgiven
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1992
Eastwood spent thirty years building the myth this film takes apart: no western has been harder on the pleasure of violence, or on the men who deal it out.
★ 8.7
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Directed by Sergio Leone
1966 · Italy
No spaghetti western got higher, and no film score is better known: Leone shoots faces like landscapes, and Morricone's music does as much work as the dialogue.
★ 8.9
No Country for Old Men
Directed by Coen Brothers
2007
The Coens made a chase film with almost no music in it at all: Javier Bardem's killer with a cattle gun became the most frightening figure of the decade.
★ 8.9
The Searchers
Directed by John Ford
1956
Other directors have been stealing from this western for seventy years: Ford put John Wayne's racism on screen without excusing it, and framed his story in a much-copied doorway.
★ 9.0
Once Upon a Time in the West
Directed by Sergio Leone
1968 · Italy
The western as ritual: Leone holds on faces until the tension turns physical, gives every character a Morricone theme, and makes three hours feel like a ceremony.
★ 9.0