Director Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff is not an action picture or a conventional Western, any more than The Assassination of Jesse James was a...
Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938
The National Film Preservation Foundation has dedicated an entire three-DVD collection to the American West and the Western. For hardcore fans, this...
Butch is Back!
We’ve seen them ride off into the sunset at the end of the story, but what happens when the heroes and outlaws, the men of myth and grand adventure,...
From Deadwood to Hollywood
Sopranos creator David Chase is working with HBO on a new miniseries, Ribbon of Dreams, about the early days of Hollywood. The two principal...
1972’s Ulzana’s Raid
Ulzana’s Raid is one of the rare movies that has a particularly strong theme—violence: what does it mean, and how is it used? To perfectly...
1958’s Terror in a Texas Town
The year 1958 saw two Westerns with similar stories: William Wyler’s big-budget, color The Big Country and the low-budget, black-and-white Terror in...
Dinos in the West
If we can be expected to accept animated cowboy chameleons and marauding aliens in our newfangled Western movie world, we may as well toss in...
True Grit
The 2010 True Grit may not have grabbed any Oscars, but it did rake in more money than any Western since Dances With Wolves. The DVD and Blu-ray...
Stars in My Crown
The 1950 movie Stars in My Crown stars Joel McCrea as a Civil War vet, Josiah Gray, who arrives in a Tenneesee town as the new pastor. The story is...
Ambush
Robert Taylor’s second Western after Billy the Kid, 1950’s Ambush, is an underrated cavalry picture. Hard boiled characters were everywhere in that...
Tim Holt Western Classics
Warner Bros. has issued the first of what I hope will be several Tim Holt collections. This five-disc, 10-movie set shows Holt at the beginning of...
Home on the Rango
Since the movie Rango opened nationally in March, the critics have struggled to get a fix on it. They can’t seem to make up their minds whether...