From Stagecoach to No Country for Old Men. The genre that taught American cinema how to compose a wide-frame shot.
The Western — the foundational American genre — peaked commercially in the 1950s, collapsed in the 1960s, was reinvented as 'revisionist Western' in the 1970s, then mostly disappeared from mainstream cinema in the late 20th century. The form's revival in the 21st century has been less about traditional Westerns and more about films that work in the Western's visual and structural language without being formally Westerns at all.
Our ten across nine decades.
The Western is the American genre most-loaded with national mythology — manifest destiny, frontier individualism, racial conquest, the violence the country was built on. This is part of why the form has, since at least the 1960s, been the genre in which American cinema does its most-serious work of national self-criticism.
Almost every great late-20th and 21st-century Western is, in some sense, a critique of the genre itself. Unforgiven dismantles the lone-gunman myth. No Country for Old Men refuses the genre's third-act resolution. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, Scorsese) treats Western settlement as the criminal enterprise it was. The genre is one of the few American forms that keeps interrogating itself.