Two minstrels (Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole) sing about the legend of Catherine “Cat” Ballou (Jane Fonda) – she was a young schoolteacher on her way home to Wolf City, Wyoming. She’s hoping to start a job there, all the while assisting her elderly father (John Marley) with the running of his ranch, which…

Like its culinary counterparts, the spaghetti western is incredibly popular – safe, reliable and enjoyed by generations across all cultures. However, its also an acquired taste, and like any genre, it’s going to have its share of successes and failures. I’m certainly not someone who advocates heavily for this kind of western, despite having enjoyed…

Paris Pitman Jr. (Kirk Douglas) is a well-known scoundrel who makes his living fleecing rich people of their fortunes. However, he’s not infallible, and one scheme results in him being caught and sent to a penitentiary, where he becomes one of a motley crew of bandits and criminals under the watchful eye of the new…

One of my biggest regrets when it comes to cinema is not having explored John Huston sooner – I only made my proper introduction to his work a couple of years ago, and with every new film I see from him, I am amazed to see what he was capable of doing – whether one…

When it came to finding the intersections between intelligence and mindless action, Sam Peckinpah was one of the best to ever live. A director whose career consisted of some of the most brutal but fascinating portrayals of violence ever produced, his status as one of the most controversial filmmakers of his generation is not ill-earned….

Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly) and his brother, Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) are a pair of hitmen in the Gold Rush era. They are in the service of a mysterious but wealthy man known only as The Commodore (Rutger Hauer), who sends them on a quest for Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist who has…

When it comes to film stars, very few people could match Paul Newman and his decades-long dominance of cinema, especially in the 1960s – with his piercing blue eyes, his subtle conviction in his willingness to challenge himself as an actor and ability to play any role across a number of genres, he truly was…

Things have a way of escalating out here in the West             ~ Buster Scruggs Joel and Ethan Coen have had such varied careers, venturing across genres and cinematic conventions to bring us several wildly different stories throughout the course of their filmmaking endeavours, each of them being unique and wonderful in their own way….

Here is something I consider to be a fact: Alex Cox made some of the best films of the 1980s. Both Repo Man, an urban satire that blended suburban paranoia with science fiction, and Sid & Nancy, one of the greatest musical biopics of all time, centered around the iconic Sid Vicious and his tragically…