westerns
LFF 2018: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs review - Wild West tales, and Redford and JackmanWednesday, 17 October 2018
The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old... Read more... |
Black 47 review - a gripping and unusual dramaThursday, 27 September 2018
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a... Read more... |
DVD: WesternFriday, 03 August 2018
Men in a wilderness, uneasy interaction with the locals, a horse… German director Valeska Grisebach’s third feature Western certainly does not lack the staples of genre that her title suggests. But there’s a vulnerable heart to this tale of cross-... Read more... |
Blu-ray/DVD: Neon BullMonday, 14 May 2018
The naturalism of Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull has an engrossing inconsequence – if that's not a contradiction in terms – that surely betrays the Brazilian director’s origins as a documentarist. Narrative in any traditional plot sense is... Read more... |
CD: Neil Young + Promise of the Real - ParadoxSaturday, 14 April 2018
Paradox is a strange stoner Western directed by Neil Young’s partner Daryl Hannah. You can see it on Netflix. The soundtrack is by Neil Young and his now regular band, Promise of the Real, which includes two of Willie Nelson's sons, Micah and Lukas... Read more... |
Hostiles review – powerful but preachy Frontier fableFriday, 05 January 2018
The last time we saw Christian Bale in a western, he was playing the downtrodden rancher Dan Evans in James Mangold’s punchy remake of 3.10 to Yuma. No doubt it was valuable experience for his role in Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s smouldering flashback... Read more... |
Godless, Netflix review – a proper wild west rideThursday, 23 November 2017
There’s a storm heading to La Belle, the small forgotten town in the heart of the American West. As black clouds flash above the prairie, the injured body of Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell) falls at the door of widowed rancher Alice Fletcher (Michelle... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Terror in a Texas TownTuesday, 25 July 2017
Many of the best Westerns, that quintessentially American genre, are rooted in a Christian view of the world: the dark forces of Satan pitted against angels, saints and the figure of Christ the Redeemer. In Terror in a Texas Town, Joseph H Lewis's... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: One-Eyed JacksTuesday, 13 June 2017
One-Eyed Jacks, the only film Marlon Brando ever directed, is a masterpiece by any reckoning, a classic western about love and treachery, as well as a startling and boundary-breaking re-invention of the genre.The tragedy unfolds, through many twists... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Two Rode TogetherTuesday, 28 March 2017
Two Rode Together (1961) depicts the humanising of Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart), a corrupt, mercenary border town marshal, as it builds to a denunciation of white racism. John Ford, who made the film as a favour to Columbia Pictures (and for a $... Read more... |
The Magnificent SevenFriday, 23 September 2016
As we know, Hollywood loves a remake, and John Sturges's original Magnificent Seven from 1960 is now venerable enough to be a complete blank to contemporary yoof. But while Sturges's tale of mercenaries defending a Mexican village from bandits had... Read more... |
DVD: My Darling ClementineFriday, 07 August 2015
In John Ford’s rueful 1946 allegory about the human cost of America’s new role as global peacekeeper, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) agrees to clean up Tombstone, Arizona, as a pretext for revenging his teenage brother's murder by Old Man Clanton (Walter... Read more... |
