The Best Westerns of All Time Offer a Gritty Look at the American Frontier

Believe it or not, this film has nothing to do with America’s beloved indie film festival. Selected for the United States National Film Registry, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a classic tale of two outlaws who head out on the lam after a botched train robbery.

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From Spaghetti Western visionary Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is an Italian epic set in the Civil War era in which three men compete for a hidden fortune.

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Nothing says “Western” quite like John Ford directing and John Wayne as the leading man. Wayne stars as a Civil War veteran who embarks on a search for his abducted niece, alongside his nephew.

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A town marshal on the verge of retirement catches wind that a group of outlaws is planning to kill him the next day at noon. Faced with a moral dilemma, he must decide whether to take on the outlaws alone, or flee town and hang up his badge for good.

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Another John Ford and John Wayne classic, Stagecoach follows the course of a motley crew of passengers on their journey across the Wild West to New Mexico in 1880.

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Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon star in this Coen Brothers Western remake as an unlikely trio who join forces when they realize they are tracking down the same murderous outlaw. What begins as one daughter’s quest to avenge her murdered father becomes an adventurous, and perilous, test of true grit.

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Another Coen Brothers 21st-century western, No Country for Old Men stars Josh Brolin as a hunter whose own trail starts being tracked after he stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong.

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John Wayne stars as a frontiersman leading his cattle drive to Missouri in hopes of reaping the hard-earned fruits of his labor. However, his road to fortune becomes bumpy when his caravan of once-loyal farmhands begins to turn on him.

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A heist film gone western, The Wild Bunch follows one outlaw’s final heist with his “wild bunch.” However, his retirement from the fast life grows more distant than he expected when he realizes that the heist was a set-up by his old partner.

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Nothing says revenge like returning to the town where your brother was murdered and becoming its sheriff. Based on the fictionalized biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, My Darling Clementine follows Earp’s journey for vengeance as the sheriff of Tombstone, where he finds both purpose and love

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John Wayne plays the sheriff off Rio Bravo, Texas in this feature. He arrests a man for murder with the help of the town drunk, played by Dean Martin. However, the sheriff’s duty proves twofold when he realizes the murderer is the brother of a wealthy rancher who is determined to free him.

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Another classic spaghetti western from Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in the West is a dual narrative of two incidents unfolding in the fictional western town of Flagstone. One: a land dispute. The other: revenge.

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