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Wild Women, Forty Pricks, and Western Noir

Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns serves as a remarkable film that fuses the Western with film noir and provides ample space, at least during its first half, for Barbara Stanwyck to provide a commanding performance that hints at what a Western female heroine might look like.

Film

The Coen Brothers Tackle Short Story in Film Again with 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs '

Not their first foray into bringing the short story form to cinema, the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs affirms, sadly, that in this regard, cinema is the lesser storytelling form.

Film

The Improbability of Communication in 'The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez'

The inability to communicate truthfully and accurately runs like a red thread through the course of Robert M. Young's western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.

Film

The Coen Brothers' 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs' Is American Myth in Vignette

In the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, there's something altogether new about having revisionist western ideas filtered through their rich sense of character, black comedy, and their penetrating awareness of humanity's fatal imperfections.

Film

'The Sisters Brothers' Blazes a Brilliant -- if Twisted -- Trail

Jacques Audiard's revisionist Western shines thanks to moral quandaries and John C. Reilly's performance.

Film

When Jim Jarmusch's 'Dead Man' Walks Into Your Mind, He Never Leaves

It's not enough to describe Dead Man as simply an anti-western; it's an iconoclastic deconstruction of late 19th Century American values and mores, many of which remain unabated more than a century later.

Film

'Coyote Doggirl' Reveals Unexpected Life Under Familiar Western Terrain

Lisa Hanawalt's work is proof that even a genre as seemingly played-out as the western can reveal a rich landscape if the right hands are holding the reins.

Books

Becoming Douglas Fairbanks: 'The Half-Breed'

Throughout his career, Fairbanks scrubbed his scripts of racist elements. The Half-Breed is a rare example when racism is foregrounded as a theme.

Film

Graphic Fiction 'The Smell of Starving Boys' Inverts Images and Expectations

Loo Hui Phang emphasizes the nature of image-making from the first panel: an upside landscape as viewed through the inverting lens of the protagonist's camera.

Books

Sundance 2018: ‘306 Hollywood’ + ‘Damsel’

Sibling directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarin deliver vastly different stories about the power of the past.

Film

All Growed Up: 'The Kentuckian' and the Myth of Freedom

In this tale of the formation of Texas, a roof over one's head is antithetical to freedom.

Film

The Characters in 'The Salvation' Are Easy to Care About but Terrifying to Watch

Mixing the classic themes of the American western with splashes of modernity makes for a attention-grabbing tale of salvation.

Reviews

The Gibson Brothers: Brotherhood

Eric and Leigh Gibson continue to innovate with a collection of bluegrass covers dedicated to fellow bands of brothers.

Music

Erik Deutsch: Outlaw Jazz

The New York keyboard extraordinaire reasserts himself to the top of the heap with the uncanny fusion of country and jazz.

Music

'For a Few Dollars More' Is a Rare Sequel That Is Superior to the Classic It Follows

The archetype of the spaghetti western finds its truest expression in this essential film from Sergio Leone.

Film

B-Film as Theory: 'The Shooting/Ride in the Whirlwind'

Two blasts of existentialist disquiet and hallucination from the stable of Roger Corman, these two Westerns launched the career of a major alternative filmmaker in Monte Hellman.

Reviews

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