Items22The creator’s order
  1. 1Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Jan 13, 1955The template for the modern western starts here: a stranger steps off a train into a desert town in 1945, and the town closes ranks. Spencer Tracy plays a one-armed veteran asking after a Japanese American farmer, and the hostility he meets turns a simple errand into a reckoning with what the town…0
  2. 2Giant (1956)Giant (1956) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 8, 1956The moment cattle money gives way to oil money, told across a quarter century on a Texas ranch of more than half a million acres. Rock Hudson's rancher Bick Benedict and James Dean's ranch hand Jett Rink both want Elizabeth Taylor's Leslie, and when Jett strikes oil on his own small plot, the old…0
  3. 3The Misfits (1961)The Misfits (1961) 7.2/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 1, 1961Aging cowboys in Nevada, with no ranch work left, round up wild mustangs to sell for slaughter, and a woman fresh from her divorce in Reno sees what they cannot admit about it. Arthur Miller wrote the script for Marilyn Monroe, and John Huston shot it in the northern Nevada desert. It was the last…0
  4. 4Lonely are the Brave (1962)Lonely are the Brave (1962) 7.5/10 on IMDbReleased Apr 26, 1962Kirk Douglas plays a cowboy who still lives by horse and open range in a New Mexico now crossed by fences and highways, and the sheriff chasing him, played by Walter Matthau, brings jeeps and a helicopter. That mismatch is the whole film, and it lands harder than any speech about the passing of the…0
  5. 5Hud (1963)Hud (1963) 7.8/10 on IMDbReleased May 24, 1963The ranch-economics western in its rawest form. A Texas Panhandle cattle family learns its herd has foot-and-mouth disease, and the question of whether to sell the sick animals before anyone finds out splits an honest old rancher from his charming, selfish son. Paul Newman makes Hud so magnetic…0
  6. 6The Last Picture Show (1971)The Last Picture Show (1971) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased Oct 3, 1971Set in the fading Texas town of Anarene in 1951, Peter Bogdanovich's black-and-white film is a coming-of-age drama with a western's soul. The cowboys are gone, the pool hall and picture house are closing, and the teenagers have nothing to inherit but wind and boredom. Ben Johnson, a veteran of…0
  7. 7Paris, Texas (1984)Paris, Texas (1984) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 16, 1984A man walks out of the Texas desert with no memory and no words, and the film follows him back toward the wife and son he abandoned. It is a western about the search rather than the showdown, and Harry Dean Stanton's weathered face carries the whole thing. Wim Wenders directed from Sam Shepard's…0
  8. 8Red Rock West (1993)Red Rock West (1993) 7.0/10 on IMDbReleased May 14, 1993A broke drifter rolls into a Wyoming town looking for work, gets mistaken for a hired killer, and takes the money. John Dahl turns that misunderstanding into a tight, darkly funny noir where every road out of town seems to loop back to the same bar. Nicolas Cage plays the decent man in over his…0
  9. 9Lone Star (1996)Lone Star (1996) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 21, 1996The thinking person's border western. When a skeleton turns up outside a Texas border town, Sheriff Sam Deeds, played by Chris Cooper, starts pulling at a decades-old killing and the legend of his own late father, also a lawman. John Sayles, whose script earned an Oscar nomination, weaves Anglo,…0
  10. 10Brokeback Mountain (2005)Brokeback Mountain (2005) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Oct 22, 2005Two 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…0