Navigating the legendary terrain of Western movies can feel a bit like being in the desert all on your lonesome. Never fear: we’ve got a list locked and loaded with the very best the genre has to offer, from cinema’s most renowned gun-slinging tales, to pioneering films that push the boundaries of what you expect from the genre. What they all share is immaculate style, and a fascination with human morality, loneliness and connection.
Cowboys are back in a big way. Or did they ever leave? Ride on into the shimmering horizon with some of the best Western movies of all time, because it’s always high noon somewhere.
10. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966)
Starring Clint Eastwood as ‘The Good’, a bounty hunter searching for $200,000 in stolen gold against the backdrop of the American Civil War, Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly exemplifies what the subgenre of the spaghetti Western is famed for (‘spaghetti’, of course, denoting Italian-ness). Satirising the mythology of the traditional, American Western, it stylishly interrogates cycles of violence, rather than glorifying them. Thanks to Ennio Morricone, it also boasts one of the most legendary, recognisable film scores of all time. Tv.apple.com
9. El Topo (1970)
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An ‘acid western’ – essentially meaning it’s a western, but on acid – Alejandro Jodorowsky’s brutal El Topo follows a man travelling on horseback with his son through the desert, embarking on a quest for enlightenment. A deranged, absurd blend of Western symbolism and Eastern mysticism, this is a luridly violent Old Testament creation myth hopped up on every psychoactive substance imaginable. It’s gorged on its own depraved excess in ways that don’t feel fun to watch, per se – but it is a spectacle to behold. Amazon.co.uk
8. No Country For Old Men (2007)
Often cited as the Coen brothers’ best film, No Country For Old Men is their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. A modern reinterpretation of the western’s key pillars – but one that still feels just as classically attuned to the genre’s majestic, gritty ode to its arid landscapes – this tale of a veteran, hitman, and a sheriff entangled in a hunt for money and justice across the Texan desert is clinically precise in its depiction of violence. Sparingly scored, with a tenseness and restraint that makes every blow feel like a visceral echo. Amazon.co.uk
7. Tampopo (1985)
The world’s first and only ‘ramen western’, Tampopo is the wild card on this list. Yes, there are cowboys here, but the only loot they’re on the hunt for is culinary glory. (They’re actually truck drivers – but listen, they’ve got the hats: that’s what matters.) This is a wild ride drenched in sensory delights, as by hook and by crook, the two truck drivers promise to help a widowed owner of a ramen restaurant master the art of ramen and save her ailing business. Wondrous, funny, and so good you can taste it. Amazon.co.uk
6. My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Drawing out the loneliness and longing of its empty, sprawling roads, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho follows two street hustlers, Mike and Scott, who journey across state and country borders in search of Mike’s long-lost mother. Played with immense tenderness by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, My Own Private Idaho doesn’t immediately strike you as a contender for this list – but its searching, wayward quest for connection earns it the descriptor of a queer, lyrical western. Amazon.co.uk
5. Django Unchained (2012)
This guns-a-blazing tale of a recently freed, enslaved Black man who teams up with a German bounty hunter to rescue his wife from a plantation owner is Quentin Tarantino’s tribute to spaghetti western movies. Replete with his signature stylisation and gratuitous violence, it’s his highest-grossing film of all time. Bloody and drenched with playful cinematic spectacle, it’s easy to see why Django Unchained is regarded as one of the director’s best. Amazon.co.uk
4. First Cow (2019)
‘Gentle’ may not be a word we readily associate with a genre renowned for its flashy violence, but Kelly Reichardt’s achingly beautiful First Cow is a Western through and through. A meek cook for a band of fur trappers meets a Chinese immigrant seeking his fortune in gold: but the two team up when they realise the business opportunities provided by covertly stealing milk from a landowner’s prized cow. Amidst all its loveliness, it comments incisively on the violence that the American Dream is built on – and whose skeletons lie quietly in the ground. Mubi.co.uk
3. True Grit (2010)
When her father is murdered by a hitman, a fourteen-year-old girl enlists the toughest, meanest U.S. Marshal she can find and hires him to exact revenge on his killer. As exhilarating as this wicked premise suggests, True Grit kind of has everything you need from a Western – including, but not limited to, a man named Rooster. Stylishly riffing on the Western’s fascination with ideas of punishment and justice, it also features a history-making performance by young Hailee Steinfeld – who became the youngest ever Oscar nominee at the time, aged 14. Amazon.co.uk
2. Bacurau (2019)
The fictional Brazilian small town of Bacurau begins to experience mysterious, unsettling happenings after the death of their matriarch – and the rest is a viscerally captivating, increasingly bizarre rollercoaster of a film with plot twists best experienced to be believed. What we can say is that it’s an incendiary, political tale, full of rage aimed at the most deserving targets. Weird and incredible – with one dazzling shootout scene that will burn itself into your corneas. Mubi.co.uk
1. The Power of The Dog (2021)
Deserving the top spot here is a film that meticulously reconstructs the genre’s mythology – and then guts it with a knife so sharp you don’t see it coming. Eerie and perfectly controlled, Jane Campion’s tale of an American rancher who psychologically torments his brother’s wife and son – for reasons that only become deliciously apparent as the film’s slow burn builds to a searing blaze – is a heady interrogation of desire, power, and masculinity that knocks the breath from your lungs.
