The western genre traditionally relies on shootouts, train robberies, and horseback chases to keep its audience entertained, but not every western movie needs to lean into high-octane action scenes to captivate viewers. Shane has a brutal bar brawl, The Wild Bunch has a blood-soaked gunfight, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly forces its characters to cross an active Civil War battlefield. But not every classic western is as action-heavy as them.
Rio Bravo spends most of its runtime hanging around with the characters while they wait patiently for the final showdown. True Grit kicks off with a high-stakes plot about a manhunt for a murderer, but it quickly becomes a touching father-daughter story. Some of the greatest westerns ever made have very little action and instead focus on rounding out their characters or conveying poignant social commentary.
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10 Slow West
John Maclean, 2015
Kodi Smit-McPhee stars in Slow West as a young Scotsman searching the frontier for his missing lover, opposite Michael Fassbender as the stoic bounty hunter he hires to accompany him. Slow West is an oddball buddy comedy full of harsh landscapes and tongue-in-cheek absurdity. The movie is appropriately titled, because it’s a slow burner. It takes a while to get going, but its payoffs arrive just in time to reward patient viewers.
9 The Sisters Brothers
Jacques Audiard, 2018
Based on the novel of the same name by Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as two brothers – a pair of notorious hired guns – who chase after two other men who are seeking their fortune in gold. It’s easy to imagine a version of this story with wall-to-wall action, but director Jacques Audiard takes a subversively subdued approach to the material. Reilly and Phoenix’s on-screen dynamic as cold-blooded brothers is as exhilarating to watch as any action sequence.
8 True Grit
Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010
An Oscar-nominated Hailee Steinfeld leads the cast of True Grit as 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who recruits cynical, hard-drinking U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn – played brilliantly by Jeff Bridges – to help her find her father’s killer. After the original movie adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel focused on Cogburn to work as a John Wayne starring vehicle, the Coens’ version refocused the story on its original protagonist, Mattie. The Coens are much more interested in Mattie and Cogburn’s surrogate father-daughter relationship than the action they get themselves into.
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7 The Power Of The Dog
Jane Campion, 2021
Jane Campion overcame the Oscars’ prejudice against Netflix releases when she swept the 94th Academy Awards with The Power of the Dog. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as a charismatic rancher who torments and terrorizes the people around him – especially his brother’s new wife. The Power of the Dog has very little action – and when there is violence, it’s not exciting; it’s unnerving – as it focuses more on its characters’ troubled psychology than their external conflicts.
6 Bad Day At Black Rock
John Sturges, 1955
A curious blend of neo-western and neo-noir, Bad Day at Black Rock stars Spencer Tracy as a mysterious one-armed man who arrives in an isolated town in the California desert and finds that the locals are immediately hostile towards him. William C. Mellor’s landscape photography is breathtaking, Millard Kaufman and Don McGuire’s screenplay keeps the mystery engaging, and Tracy is backed up by A-list supporting players like Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin. Bad Day at Black Rock doesn’t need much action; it keeps its audience on the edge of their seat with unanswered questions instead.
5 Killers Of The Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese, 2023
More than half a century into his filmmaking career, Martin Scorsese finally took a crack at the western genre with Killers of the Flower Moon. Most western movies glorify America’s white settlers and vilify the indigenous people whose land they stole, but Killers of the Flower Moon flips that on its head. It’s a challenging tale of greed and corruption, telling the true story of the murderers who infiltrated a peaceful native community in a bid to usurp their oil fortune. Killers of the Flower Moon is hard-going, but it’s a quintessential American saga upending the western genre’s whitewashed myths.
4 The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs
Joel & Ethan Coen, 2018
The Coen brothers returned to their quirky vision of the Old West for a six-part anthology in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. These vignettes are more about the hardship of life on the American frontier than the violence that occurred. One segment has a bank heist and another segment has a big shootout, but action is never the movie’s primary focus. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ short stories range from whimsical and lighthearted to dark and disturbing – but they’re all compelling.
3 Rio Bravo
Howard Hawks, 1959
Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo is one of the few westerns to earn a place in the “hangout movie” canon. In response to the cowardice of Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon, Hawks made a movie about a lawman who casually awaits the arrival of an outlaw hellbent on killing him. Sheriff John T. Chance doesn’t frantically ask the townspeople for help; he just kicks back and gets to know his two new deputies. Rio Bravo does culminate in a nail-biting shootout, but the majority of the movie focuses on dialogue and characterization.
2 The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
Andrew Dominik, 2007
The title of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is often teased for giving away the ending of the movie, but there’s a reason for the spoiler in its title. This isn’t a whodunit; it’s a character study. If the audience knows going in that Robert Ford will kill Jesse James, then the pair’s initial friendship is even more compelling, because a grim ending has already been foreshadowed. Andrew Dominik’s beautifully bleak movie is much more invested in their relationship than the eventual killing – context is king.
1 Unforgiven
Clint Eastwood, 1992
Clint Eastwood specifically set out to upend a lot of the western movie tropes he helped to establish in his revisionist masterpiece Unforgiven. Eastwood stars as William Munny, an aging gunslinger filled with regret about his murderous past, who reluctantly agrees to one last job to avenge a mutilated sex worker. Munny represents the dark future that awaits characters like Eastwood’s iconic “Man with No Name” antihero. Unforgiven doesn’t glorify violence; it shows killing for what it really is: a cowardly, inhumane, deeply destructive act.
