Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Two young ranch hands meet herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain in 1963 and carry a love they cannot live openly through two decades of marriages, rodeos, odd jobs and fishing trips. It belongs here because the West itself is the obstacle: the codes of masculinity, the small towns, the threat of violence for anyone who breaks them. Ang Lee won the Oscar for Best Director, and Heath Ledger's tight-jawed, near-silent performance is one of the great portraits of a Western man who cannot say what he feels. It is a romance first, but few films capture the loneliness of ranch country so well.