The Video Station: (303) 440-4448

I found two great reasons for watching this take on Butch Cassidy, post-Paul Newman: first, the marvelously cast Sam Shepard, as Butch; and second, the unreal cinematography of Juan Ruiz Anchia, who shoots the Bolivian landscape as a cross between John Ford’s Monument Valley and David Lean’s Arabian desert.

I never could have imagined a film that’s the perfect cross between John Ford and Michelangelo Antonioni; but now that it exists in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, it’s a dream come true.

I won’t go into grisly detail, but this past Saturday, I found myself huddled under a quilt on my couch, near catatonic from a bout of food poisoning. Just lifting the DVD remote required a focused, conscious effort, so you can imagine how I looked upon the prospect of rising [...]

This epic, romantic, action film is set in Australia pre-World War II. English aristocrat Kate (Nicole Kidman) travels to Australia to convince her estranged husband to sell their cattle ranch, come home, and live a proper married life. What she finds is far more than she has bargained for. She meets a rough-and-tumble ranch hand [...]

Two things I learned about Ed Harris while watching Appaloosa: one, Ed Harris is a great admirer of classic Western cinema; two, Ed Harris is not a director. His heart is there but his vision just isn’t. The first of these truths is clear straight away. By polarizing the two scenes that precede the title [...]

Another Larry McMurtry TV miniseries, similar to Lonesome Dove, Dead Man’s Walk, Streets of Laredo, et al. It’s pretty much a buddy cop movie, but with cowboys instead of cops.

Set in 1881, this western takes its sweet time explaining a very simple title. Brad Pitt (Cool World) plays the outlaw James who watches as his gang of bandits falls apart to the point where all he’s got left are the two brothers Ford. Casey Affleck (Drowning Mona) and Sam Rockwell (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) [...]

If film critics are to be believed, and they rarely should be, the Western, a genre which has been part of the industry since the days of silent movies, is dead. Long considered to be a creatively bankrupt subject matter, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven back in 1992 was meant to be the death knell of the [...]