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
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 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
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
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 Wild Bunch
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1969
Peckinpah showed at once what the new ratings system had licensed: slow motion, six cameras firing together, and a body count that made every western before it look polite.
★ 8.6
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Directed by John Huston
1948
Huston won two Oscars for it and directed his own father to a third: three men look for gold in Mexico and the heat does the rest.
★ 8.0
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
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
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
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
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
Django Unchained
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2012
Tarantino turned American slavery into a spaghetti western and got away with it: a freed slave rides with a German bounty hunter, and the dialogue never stops crackling.
★ 7.2
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
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
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Directed by Robert Altman
1971
Altman made a western out of mud, snow and Leonard Cohen songs: a small-time gambler and a businesslike madam build a frontier town out of almost nothing.
★ 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
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
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
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
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