See cinema differently
Year: 1954 Director: Nicholas Ray Stars: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge Everything is explosive in Johnny Guitar. Miners shout. Waterfalls roar. Emotions over-boil. Guns fire. The movie starts with a detonation as developers encroach on the land in the vicinity of Vienna's saloon, setting the tone for the remainder of the picture. In his archival …
Year: 1959 Director: André de Toth Stars: Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Tina Louise The Western is a vast country to travel, and I'll freely admit I've only seen a small part of it. But from what I have seen I'd happily call Day of the Outlaw the meanest. Even before the central threat of the …
Year: 1939 Director: George Marshall Stars: Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Brian Donlevy When it comes to Westerns, I'm a picky sod. I'm not fond of John Wayne (even allowing for the changing of the times I find him priggish and his roles often steeped in misogyny and racism). I'll enjoy a romping adventure but it'll …
Director: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre Stars: Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruce Dern, Gideon Adlon At the beginning of Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre's feature debut, on-screen text advises us that there are upwards of 100,000 wild mustangs roaming the United States, and that many of these are rounded up and captured; some sent to prisons to be broken by inmates, …
Director: Jacques Audiard Stars: John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) and Eli (John C Reilly) are hired hands. The year is 1851. These brothers - the Sisters brothers - are in the employ of The Commodore (Rutger Hauer), and do his bidding for tidy reward. At the beginning of the picture …
Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen Stars: Zoe Kazan, Tom Waits, Liam Neeson The Coen Brothers have made Westerns before, and more than just the two 'obvious ones'; the Texan noir of No Country For Old Men and their adventurous remake of True Grit. In truth the West has scored through much of their cinema which is resplendent …
Year: 1950 Director: Anthony Mann Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson This year I've been fervently trying to even up my experience of the so-called golden age of cinema, in doing so I've made attempts to embrace one of the genres that I have previously spied with dubiousness and suspicion; the western. To the …
Director: Warwick Thornton Stars: Hamilton Morris, Bryan Brown, Sam Neill There is a point in Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country in which the director shows us the sun. Acting as his own cinematographer, Thornton passes the lens of the camera across the sky and our distant star is recast as a remorseless beast sporting white-hot tendrils. And …
Director: Antoine Fuqua Stars: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Haley Bennett Denzel Washington - doggedly the least-interesting A-list actor working today - heads up the cast of this wholly unnecessary retread of John Sturges' 1960 film, itself a derivation of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai; a film which frequently finds itself in the top end of critics' polls of …
Director: David Mackenzie Stars: Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges, Ben Foster The economics of what keeps the rich rich and the poor poor often seem like a rigged game, especially in our present financial climate. It is with intense anger at this capitalist monopoly that David Mackenzie's modern Western Hell Or High Water finds relevancy. Hell, it's …
Conventional wisdom tells us that violence and vengeance form a circle, but that notion suggests the return to a beginning place, a place of innocence where said violence existed only in potential. What if, instead, it were a spiral, emanating from a microcosmic central point, it's range growing ever-wider as it sprawls out into the universe? How …
The Hateful Eight appears, upfront, to be a western. Quentin Tarantino's 8th feature film (as he takes great pride in advising us right out of the gate) takes place several years after the end of the Civil War in the coldest wastes of wintry Wyoming. It begins, as Django Unchained before it, with a bounty hunter stopping …
While we wait with varying levels of impatience for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, another western starring Kurt Russell has crept its way onto UK shores with little fanfare. Writer / director S Craig Zahler's Bone Tomahawk is a rich find in the present cinematic landscape, though you may be hard pressed to locate it. That's a shame. Because it …
A western with prominent female characters? It's not unheard of but, by and large, the genre is foremost perceived as a boy's club, as much as the gung-ho WW2 flick or the all American baseball movie. Women in westerns are usually either prostitutes or nagging wives. A sorry state of affairs. So when one comes …
Year: 2007 Director: Andrew Dominik Stars: Brad Pitt (Jesse James), Casey Affleck (Robert Ford), Sam Rockwell (Charley Ford), Sam Shepard (Frank James), Jeremy Renner (Wood Hite), Paul Schneider (Dick Liddil), Garret Dillahunt (Ed Miller), Mary Louise Parker (Zee James) Genre: Western With my local cinemas stuck in a loop giving victory laps to the big …
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