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The credits for The Hateful Eight proudly proclaim this to be the “Eighth Film” from writer/director Quentin Tarantino. Since catching the movie world unawares with his powerhouse debut, Reservoir Dogs, some 23 years ago, he has worked on...

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That single quote, uttered by newspaperman Maxwell Scott (Carlton Young), encapsulates the primary theme of John Ford's last great Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Truth is only meanin...

Violence comes in many shapes, sizes, and forms. Twenty-six years ago, when Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch was first released, it caused a stir because of its gritty, uncompromising style. The deaths in this film are neither sterile nor heroic. W...

There was a time when the western was one of Hollywood's most popular genres. Whether it was Gary Cooper standing tall in High Noon, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas taking out the Clantons in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Wayne fighting the Apa...

By 1952, movie-goers knew exactly what to expect from a Western: a clean-cut, self-assured hero facing down a good-for-nothing villain in a climactic shoot-out, lots of action, gorgeous scenery, and not much in the way of thematic depth. This was...

The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Birdman, plays like a cross between Terrence Malick and Sam Peckinpah. As unlikely as such a conflation might seem, the result works - sometimes to stunning effect. In a...

Despite arriving during the era when this kind of movie was beginning a slow but inexorable fall from public favor, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid remains one of the best crafted and most beloved of all the Westerns. In addition to launching R...

All Quiet on the Western Front is the definitive World War I motion picture, the best of a surprisingly small class of movies. Despite being overshadowed in history by the conflict of the late 1930s and early 1940s, The Great War was the subject o...

True Grit, one of the best films of 2010, is a reminder of why remakes are not always bad. The Coen Brothers' interpretation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel is superior in almost every way (except one) to the 1969 Henry Hathaway edition. And, whil...

One of the great strengths of Quentin Tarantino's films is the way his love of cinema permeates every frame. From subtle, throw-away lines and in-jokes to more obvious nods (such as the "old fashioned" Columbia logo at the beginning or the '70s-sty...