westerns

As anyone with a Hulu subscription knows, the popular streaming service gives you access to thousands of movies, TV shows, documentaries, and pretty much every other type of filmed media. But do you know what else Hulu has in great supply? Westerns. In fact, the platform is home to several of the best Westerns of all time, both those set in the Old West and more contemporary stories set in modernity. If you’re looking to revisit one of the best ‘90s movies, a forgotten epic that was beefed up years after release, or…

From its thunderous score, which sounds at times like someone dismantling an orchestra with a mallet, to the huge, intimidating, blood-red lettering of the intertitles, to the gut punch of an opening scene: violence, or the threat of it, lurks in every frame of Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s assured debut.Opening in 1901 in the sprawling wilderness of Tierra del Fuego, Chile, this Spanish- and English-language film is partly based on true events – including multiple massacres of the indigenous Selk’nam people by white settlers –…

Chris Christmas, a fourth-generation Black cowboy with Native American roots, considers the cowboy hat to be an indispensable part of his heritage. “I think I was born with a cowboy hat,” said the 57-year-old Denverite, whose family has resided in Colorado for 120 years. With dozens of hats in his collection today, “I buy them like sneakers,” he laughed. Christmas is pressing against the longstanding stereotype of a white-washed American West by working with hat shaper Parker Orms on a line of headwear stylized on “the…

A grizzled frontier shopkeeper must draw on his outlaw gunslinger past to avenge the murder of his wife, in this generic western retread. The key to the approach is in the title – there’s a timeworn predictability in everything from the plot (variations of this story have been told many times before, most recently in the superior Old Henry) to the big, expansive, Alfred Newman-inspired score, to the widescreen wild west backdrop.Two elements make the picture worth watching: one is Nicolas Cage, wearily brutal as Colton…

Bo Hopkins, who has died aged 84, established his credentials as a character actor early in his film career. But he was already 31 when, in The Wild Bunch (1969), his third film role, he played Crazy Lee, left behind by the gang with their hostages as they escape an ambush. His glee as he marches the terrified captives around at gunpoint singing We Shall Gather at the River highlighted the violent absurdity of the director Sam Peckinpah’s opening scene. In American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas, he played the…

The Australian film-maker Leah Purcell adapted (from her own play, which was in turn based on an 1892 short story), directed and stars in this solid outback western. The handsome photography is a stark contrast to the grim realities of the hard-scrabble lives eked out in this unforgiving land. The film tackles issues of race, sexual violence and the low-level simmering cruelty that is a fact of life for those hardy individuals who make a life in the bush in the late 19th century. And there are few more resilient than…

“This is the west sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The famous line uttered by a newspaperman in John Ford’s masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance symbolizes the mythological west that he and his most famous collaborator, John Wayne popularized. At 60 years old, it is the greatest western of Hollywood’s Golden Age, even usurping Ford’s own The Searchers that has always clambered its way near the top of greatest film lists.The story focuses on Ransome Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), an American senator…

When characters realize the world they know is in fact “something else,” they have permanently crossed a threshold. The thin membrane they might otherwise call normality has been punctured, and the air of stability drains out. There is some attempt to clutch their worlds close, to grab something pinned down. But it is, inevitably, too late: there is no putting normal back when it never existed in the first place. Almost all fiction involves characters trying to fix or improve their world. But only one genre targets…