Few genres are as steeped in myth and moral weight as the Western, and fewer film-makers understood that better than Sergio Leone, whose The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains one of cinema's great operatic experiences. At its best the genre strips storytelling down to landscape, silence and consequence. See what Macca makes of the classics and the revisionist takes in the reviews below.
Rating: 3.0★
Released in 2002, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron arrived at an interesting crossroads for DreamWorks Animation. The studio had spent the previous few years carving out its identity in opposition to Disney, leaning on irreverence, celebrity voices and knowing winks to the audience. Spirit is none of those things. Co-
Rating: 2.0★
The Oregon Trail has cast a long shadow over American mythology, and cinema has returned to it often enough to establish its own set of conventions: the wagon circle, the hostile horizon, the guide whose confidence outpaces his competence. Meek's Cutoff (2010) takes that familiar premise and strips
Rating: 3.5★
Clint Eastwood does not ease you into The Outlaw Josey Wales. It opens with an act of violence so sudden and ugly that you feel it before you've had a chance to brace yourself, and that readiness to start on a gut-punch and make you live in
Rating: 3.5★
There is a specific, haunting beauty to the way Roger Deakins shoots a train robbery in the dead of winter. Lantern light catching frozen breath, the world rendered in blues and greys and that particular silence that only deep snow can create. That single sequence tells you everything you need
Rating: 3.5★
There is a haunting beauty to the American Midwest that few filmmakers have ever captured quite like Terrence Malick. His 1973 debut, Badlands, is one of those films you feel as much as you watch. It drifts over you like heat rising off a sun-baked road, gorgeous and unsettling
Rating: 3.5★
Right out of the gate, Jeymes Samuel's Western announces itself as something genuinely different, and I was hooked before the opening titles had finished. The premise alone is enough to sit up and pay attention: an all-Black outlaw gang riding through the Old West, chasing revenge and
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment in Westworld where the holiday is over and the horror begins, and Michael Crichton makes you feel that shift in your gut before you've even fully registered it. One second you're watching two blokes larking about in a cowboy fantasy, the
Genre Western
★★★½ — The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Genre Western
★★½ — Rio Bravo (1959)
Genre Western
★★★½ — Ride Lonesome (1959)
Genre Western
★½ — The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Genre Western
★★★ — Bone Tomahawk (2015)
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