In this his eighth feature film, Quentin Tarantino has made it very clear what he’s all about. The auteur’s hallmarks litter the frames of “Django Unchained,” the closest he’s come to making a film in the style of his favorite genre (arguably, but it’s not really a contest) — the Spaghetti Western.

Seriously, prohibition did no one any favors. “Lawless” is a Western-inspired take on the gangster pic, in which the only rules are that there are no rules and the men with the power are the men who wield the most fear — and guns.

The answer to the obvious question hovering around Jon Favreau’s latest action blockbuster is yes, “Cowboys & Aliens” is as ridiculous as the title sounds. Yet blame doesn’t quite belong on Favreau’s shoulders or that of star Daniel Craig or the rest of the cast; rather, the failure of this alien-infested Western results from the […]

The Coen brothers have delivered some of the most challenging films of the last few years, ever since winning Oscar glory for contemporary Western “No Country for Old Men.” The Coens’ remake of the 1969 film (or as some would say, the second adaptation of the Charles Portis novel) “True Grit” does constitute as a bit of […]

Somewhere in the four-plus hours of film that New Zealand director Andrew Dominik shot for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” has to be a cut fully capable of winning an Oscar for Best Picture. This version, however, is not it, but it’s beautifully filmed and supported by incredible acting. Length […]

The first thing that stands out about “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” is that it’s not gun- shy about its moral storytelling. From the get-go, legendary director John Huston, who wrote the script and directed based on a novel by B. Traven, feeds us foreshadowing about the perils of money and seeking great fortune. […]

Trying to beef up my archives here on the site. I watched this classic earlier in the summer. Though it would later be cemented when they re-teamed with George Roy HIll in 1973’s “The Sting,” Paul Newman and Robert Redford create one of the greatest film duos in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” You’d […]

After completing the Dollars trilogy, one would come to expect Sergio Leone to have reached his peak with “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” just two years earlier, but he doesn’t let up an inch with “Once Upon A Time in the West.” The Italian-born filmmaker delivers once again the kind of western the […]