Western

Tom Selleck gives the boldest performance of his career in this "new style, revisionist western with the panoramic scope of a movie epic" (Los Angeles Times). Fierce gunfights, forbidding landscapes, breakneck chases - all hallmarks of the classic western - are reinvented in this hard-pounding actioner that "revitalizes the genre" and comes out "a sure winner" (The Hollywood Reporter). Arriving in Australia with nothing more than a saddle and his prized six-foot Sharps rifle, American sharpshooter Matthew Quigley thinks he's been hired to kill off wild dogs.

Expertly directed by John Huston (The Maltese Falcon) from a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Miller, The Misfits is a "probing, exciting drama" (Film Daily) of honesty, intensity and sheer poetic brilliance. Divorced and disillusioned, Roslyn Tabor (Marilyn Monroe) befriends a group of "misfits," including an aging cowboy (Clark Gable), a heartbroken mechanic (Eli Wallach) and a worn-out rodeo rider (Montgomery Clift). Through their live-for-the-moment lifestyle, Roslyn experiences her first taste of freedom, exhilaration and passion.

In 19th century Mexico, a native revolutionary, Yaqui Joe, robs a bank to buy arms for his oppressed people but he finds himself wanted by American lawmen and the Mexican Army. Jim Brown (El Condor), Raquel Welch (Fathom) and Burt Reynolds (White Lightning) set the screen ablaze in this intense and muscular western, bursting with rousing nonstop action and humorous charm. When an American police officer (Brown) comes to Mexico to arrest criminal (Reynolds) for robbery, he finds himself detained by both an Indian revolution against the Mexican government...

Set in 1892, Hostiles tells the story of a legendary Army captain (Christian Bale) who, after stern resistance, reluctantly agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back to tribal lands. Making the harrowing and perilous journey from Fort Berringer, an isolated Army outpost in New Mexico, to the grasslands of Montana, the former rivals encounter a young widow (Rosamund Pike) whose family was murdered on the plains. Together, they must join forces to overcome the punishing landscape, hostile Comanche, and vicious outliers that they encounter along the way.

Discover the lavish spectacle, sizzling romance and intense drama of Cecil B. DeMille's vivid pre-Revolutionary settles vs. Indians saga! Academy Award winner Gary Cooper stars as peace-loving Chris Holden, a militiaman who buys and then frees beautiful English slave Abby Hale (Paulette Goddard). When a supplier of illegal firearms covets Abby for himself, he sparks a vicious battle between an Indian tribe and a few brave colonists.

The Western has been an endangered species, on and off, for something like 40 years now. Welcome to Appaloosa, Ed Harris's film of the Robert B. Parker novel--first because it exists at all, but even more because Harris as star, director, and co-screenwriter (with Robert Knott) has managed to bring it to the screen with no hint of fuss or strain, as if the making of no-nonsense, copiously pleasurable Westerns were still something Hollywood did with regularity. Harris plays Virgil Cole, one of those ace gunfighter-lawmen whose name need only be mentioned to make a saloon go still.

A different sort of Sergio Leone Western, this one takes place during the Mexican Revolution, with more politics than usual. But there's still plenty of action, with Rod Steiger as a cigar-chomping peasant who robs banks to liberate political prisoners, and James Coburn as an Irish terrorist trying to flee from his bitter past. They team up to thwart a sadistic officer and help the cause; redemption for the more subdued Coburn provides added depth.

A great-looking, well-acted Western in the old-school tradition, Seraphim Falls is definitely worth a look for fans of the genre. There's nothing really new here (which explains why it played only briefly in theaters), and more than a few critics noted its obvious similarities to Clint Eastwood's classic The Outlaw Josey Wales. Still, you have to admire director and cowriter David Von Ancken (a 10-year TV veteran making his feature debut) for delivering an engrossing post-Civil War revenge story (cowritten with Abby Everett Jacques) that isn't hobbled by its overly familiar plotting.

Of all the movies made about or glancingly involving the 19th-century outlaw Jesse Woodson James, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the most reflective, most ambitious, most intricately fascinating, and indisputably most beautiful. Based on the novel of the same name by Ron Hansen, it picks up James late in his career, a few hours before his final train robbery, then covers the slow catastrophe of the gang's breakup over the next seven months even as the boss himself settles into an approximation of genteel retirement.

Here's hoping James Mangold's big, raucous, and ultrabloody remake of 3:10 to Yuma leads some moviegoers to check out Delmer Daves's beautifully lean, half-century-old original. That classic Western spun a tale of captured outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford)--deadly but disarmingly affable--and the small-time rancher and family man, Dan Evans (Van Heflin), desperate enough to accept the job of helping escort the badman to Yuma prison.