Rankings
The Best Westerns Ever Made, From the Myth to the Correction
The western is the only genre that spent fifty years building a myth and then another fifty taking it apart. Both halves produced masterpieces, and they are best watched in conversation.
Hero image: Once Upon a Time in the West (artwork via TMDB)
Key takeaways
- The genre has three phases: the classic myth, the revisionist correction, and the modern western in modern clothes.
- Once Upon a Time in the West and Unforgiven are the two best, and they are arguing with each other.
- The Searchers is the most important and the most uncomfortable, and both facts are inseparable.
- Hell or High Water proves the genre is alive: it is a western with pickup trucks and a bank.
The western is unique among genres in that it spent roughly fifty years constructing a national myth and then another fifty systematically dismantling it, and both halves produced great films. That makes it unusually rewarding to watch chronologically, because the later films are frequently direct replies to the earlier ones.
This guide is organised in three phases, with the best of each. If you only take one thing from it: watch The Searchers and then Unforgiven, in that order, and the entire genre will make sense.
Phase one: the myth
The Searchers (1956)
- 1h 59m
- TMDB 7.7/10
- Western
The most important western ever made and the most uncomfortable. John Ford directing John Wayne as a man spending five years hunting for a niece taken by Comanche, driven by a racism the film makes entirely explicit.
This is what makes it remarkable rather than merely dated. Ethan Edwards is not a hero the film endorses. He states plainly that he intends to kill his niece rather than let her live as a Comanche, and the film treats that as monstrous while never letting him off the hook.
The final shot, in which Ethan stands in a doorway watching a family reunite and then turns and walks away as the door closes on him, is the most quoted image in the genre and the clearest statement of its central idea: the man who makes civilisation possible cannot live in it.
The film's own attitudes toward Indigenous characters remain a real limitation and are worth being honest about. 119 minutes.
Watch it if: you want the foundation everything else is built on or arguing with.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
- 2h 46m
- TMDB 8.3/10
- Drama, Western
Sergio Leone's masterpiece and the most beautiful film in the genre. A widow arrives to claim land, a harmonica player pursues a gunman, and a railway is coming.
The opening sequence is roughly twelve minutes of three men waiting at a train station, with no dialogue and no score, just a windmill, a dripping tap, and a fly. It is the boldest opening in any film here and it teaches you the film's pace immediately.
Ennio Morricone wrote the score before shooting and Leone played it on set, which is why image and music are so completely fused. Each character has a theme, and the harmonica motif functions as a plot device.
Casting Henry Fonda, then the most reliably decent presence in American cinema, as a man who shoots a child in his introduction, is one of the great acts of casting subversion. 165 minutes and worth every one.
Watch it if: you want the most gorgeous film in the genre and you have patience for a slow build.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
- 2h 41m
- TMDB 8.5/10
- Western
The most purely entertaining western ever made and the most recognisable. Three men hunt for buried gold during the American Civil War, and the film's structure is essentially a long chase with a three-way standoff at the end.
The final Mexican standoff in the cemetery runs several minutes on almost nothing but eyes, hands, and Morricone's score, and it is the single most imitated sequence in the genre.
The Civil War material in the middle is the film's underrated element: an extended sequence about a pointless battle over a bridge that neither side wants, which is genuinely angry in a way the rest of the film is not.
178 minutes, and it moves faster than that suggests. Watch it before Once Upon a Time in the West.
Watch it if: you have never seen a western and want to know why people love them.
Phase two: the correction
Unforgiven (1992)
- 2h 10m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Western
The definitive revisionist western and the film that closed the genre's argument with itself. Clint Eastwood, who built his career on the myth, directs and stars in its dismantling.
Its method is to take every convention and show the cost. The retired gunfighter cannot mount his horse. The shooting is not clean; men take a long time to die and beg for water. The young gunslinger who wants a reputation vomits after his first killing and gives it up immediately.
The most important line is delivered flatly: "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have." That is the entire genre being corrected in two sentences.
The final act then deliberately gives you the mythic showdown you wanted, and makes it feel like a horror sequence. 131 minutes.
Watch it if: you have seen the classics. This is the reply, and it needs them to land.
The Wild Bunch (1969)
- 2h 25m
- TMDB 7.6/10
- Western
Sam Peckinpah's 1969 film about aging outlaws in 1913, out of time and out of options, and the film that permanently changed how screen violence works.
The two set-piece massacres use multiple cameras at different frame rates cut together, so violence arrives in overlapping slow motion and normal speed simultaneously. It was designed to make the audience aware of what they were enjoying, and it was extremely controversial.
Underneath it is a film about obsolescence: men whose entire skill set has stopped being valuable, choosing a spectacular death over an irrelevant life.
135 minutes and still genuinely shocking.
Watch it if: you want the film that ended the classical western by force.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
- 2h 0m
- TMDB 7.2/10
- Drama, Western
Robert Altman's anti-western, and the most atmospheric film here. A gambler and a brothel madam build a business in a muddy, half-finished mining town in the Pacific Northwest, and a mining company decides it wants their holdings.
Everything the genre usually provides is withheld. It is cold and wet rather than dusty. The dialogue overlaps and is frequently inaudible. The protagonist is not competent, he is a man with a reputation he did not earn and cannot live up to.
Leonard Cohen songs over the soundtrack should not work and are the reason the film is unforgettable.
The ending, cross-cutting a gunfight with a fire nobody is watching, is the bleakest thing in the genre. 120 minutes.
Watch it if: you want the western stripped of every romantic element.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
- 2h 40m
- TMDB 7.1/10
- Drama, Western
The most beautiful film on this page and the slowest. Andrew Dominik's study of celebrity, told through the last months of Jesse James and the young man who idolised and then shot him.
Roger Deakins shot it with period-appropriate lens distortion at the frame edges, so images blur toward the corners like an old photograph. It is one of the great achievements in cinematography.
Its actual subject is parasocial obsession, roughly a decade before that became a common term. Robert Ford knows everything about Jesse James from dime novels and cannot cope with the reality of the man.
160 minutes and genuinely unhurried. Casey Affleck's performance is extraordinary.
Watch it if: you want a meditation rather than a story, and you have the patience.
Phase three: the modern western
No Country for Old Men (2007)
- 2h 2m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Crime, Thriller, Western
A western in every respect except period. A man finds money in the desert, a relentless figure pursues him, and an aging lawman fails to keep up with a world he no longer understands.
The Coens strip out almost all music, so the film is carried entirely by wind, boots, and breathing. That absence is why the tension is unbearable.
Anton Chigurh is the genre's frontier violence made abstract: arbitrary, unstoppable, and indifferent. The coin toss is the whole idea in one gesture.
The ending, in which the climactic confrontation happens off screen and the film concludes with a man describing a dream, infuriated audiences and is exactly right. 122 minutes.
Watch it if: you want the best modern western and one of the best films of the century.
Hell or High Water (2016)
- 1h 42m
- TMDB 7.3/10
- Western, Crime, Drama
The clearest proof the genre is alive. Two brothers rob branches of the bank that is foreclosing on their family ranch, using the bank's own money to pay it off, while a Texas Ranger weeks from retirement pursues them.
Taylor Sheridan's screenplay is the best original western script in decades. The economics are the antagonist: every town they pass through has debt relief billboards, and the film's sympathies are entirely with people being processed by a system.
Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham's partnership, built on constant low-grade insult, is the warmest thing in it.
102 minutes, the shortest film on this page, and not a wasted scene.
Watch it if: you want a western with pickup trucks that is as good as the classics.
The Power of the Dog (2021)
- 2h 7m
- TMDB 6.7/10
- Drama, Western
Jane Campion's 1925-set film about a rancher who torments his brother's new wife and her son, and it is the most tightly wound thing here.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil as a man performing a version of frontier masculinity so aggressively that the performance is visible, and the film is patient enough to let you work out why.
It is structured as a slow reveal in which almost nothing appears to happen, and the final twenty minutes recontextualise the entire film. On rewatch it is a completely different experience.
126 minutes, with Jonny Greenwood's dissonant string score doing an enormous amount of work.
Watch it if: you want a western about masculinity as a costume.
Five more essentials
High Noon runs in near real time as a marshal fails to find anyone willing to help him, and it was read at the time as a comment on political cowardice. Rio Bravo was made by Howard Hawks and John Wayne specifically as a rebuttal to High Noon, arguing that professionals do not ask for help, which makes the pair the best double bill in the genre. True Grit is the Coens' version, and Hailee Steinfeld's fourteen-year-old is the best performance in it. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the most charming, and its freeze-frame ending is one of cinema's best. And First Cow is Kelly Reichardt's very quiet film about two men and a stolen milk supply, and it is a western about friendship and small business.
How to watch the genre
| Watch this | Then this | What you learn |
|---|---|---|
| The Searchers | Unforgiven | The myth, then its correction |
| High Noon | Rio Bravo | Two films actively arguing with each other |
| The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | Once Upon a Time in the West | Leone getting serious |
| No Country for Old Men | Hell or High Water | The genre surviving in modern dress |
Where to start
If westerns are not your genre, start with Hell or High Water. It is 102 minutes, set in the present day, structurally a crime film, and it does everything the genre does without requiring you to accept horses and hats.
If you want the classic experience, start with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is the most immediately entertaining, then go to Unforgiven, which will make you want to go back and understand what it is replying to.
Do not start with McCabe & Mrs. Miller or The Assassination of Jesse James. Both are magnificent and both assume you already love the genre enough to watch it being taken apart slowly.
For more, our Tarantino ranking covers Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, best action movies covers the adjacent genre, and the western catalog has the wider list.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best western movie of all time?
Once Upon a Time in the West for pure filmmaking, Unforgiven for what it says about the genre, and The Searchers for historical importance. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the most purely entertaining.
What is a revisionist western?
A western that deliberately dismantles the genre's own myths, showing violence as ugly, heroes as compromised, and the frontier as brutal rather than romantic. Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller are the defining examples.
What is the best modern western?
No Country for Old Men, which is a western in everything but period. Hell or High Water is the best contemporary-set one and the most accessible entry point for anyone who does not like the genre.
Which western should I watch first?
Hell or High Water if you are sceptical of the genre, since it is modern-dress and only 102 minutes. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly if you want the classic experience and are happy with a 178 minute runtime.
Is The Searchers racist?
Its protagonist is explicitly and deliberately racist, and the film treats that as monstrous rather than heroic. The film's own depiction of Indigenous characters is a genuine limitation of its era, and both things are true at once.
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