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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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