William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oats walking with weapons in The Wild Bunch.Image via Warner Bros.
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Jeremy Urquhart
Published 57 minutes ago
Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He is also currently in the process of trying to become a Stephen King expert by reading all 2397 novels written by the author.
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If you watch your fair share of Westerns, then you're probably going to stumble over plenty of films that feel ambitious without necessarily setting your sights on ambitious ones specifically. If a film isn't a neo-Western, it has to recreate a time in history that happened long ago, and Westerns are also defined by the fact that many of them are set largely outdoors, necessitating on-location shoots or enough technical competency to make sets look like they're outdoors.
Westerns also explore sometimes heavy and/or delicate themes like crime, justice, gender, and race, so if a Western endeavors to tackle any combination of those (or other things), that can make it feel further ambitious. In an attempt to highlight some of the biggest and most risk-taking Westerns of all time, here’s a rundown of some notably ambitious ones, with films included regardless of whether the risks paid off or not.
10 'Giant' (1956)
Elizabeth Taylor sitting in a truck next to James Dean in Giant (1956)Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Yes, the movie called Giant is big, running for more than three hours all up while telling a story that spans not just years, but generations. Much of it involves a dispute over land, with the most valuable of said land being desired by more than one party, though the film is overall not nearly as heavy as other (sort of) Westerns with comparable premises, like There Will Be Blood and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Giant isn't trying to be as heavy or harrowing, though, instead focusing its sights on making you feel like you're watching a family conflict build and develop over a great deal of time. It doesn’t feel like it takes years to watch (thankfully), but it is successful in painting a portrait of a great deal of time, also doing so within the confines of something that feels almost – but not aggressively – like a melodrama, at times.
9 'The Emigrants' (1971) & 'The New Land' (1972)
Image via Svensk Filmindustri
With The Emigrants and The New Land, the latter feels like it more easily classifies as a Western, albeit it’s not really a traditional Western. Also, you can’t have one without the other, as both make up one immense epic that runs for more than six hours. The Emigrants is about a Swedish family making the journey to America in the mid-19th century, while The New Land is more about their experiences once they arrive.
It's a truly harrowing epic, because it pulls no punches in showing how awful travel by sea was back then, and further horrors await once the family reaches their destination, and they realize it’s not as idyllic or peaceful as they'd been hoping for. It’s all just brutally real, and also very brutal, but the immensity of the production – and all the hard-hitting emotional stuff – can’t be denied.
8 'The Good, the Bad, the Weird' (2008)
Jung Woo-sung walking across a rooftop and holding a rifle in The Good, the Bad, the WeirdImage via CJ Entertainment
There’s another iconic Western with a very similar name (and it'll get outlined in a bit), but The Good, the Bad, the Weird is more recent and has a bit more by way of explosive action than that older Western. But both movies are about three people – referred to in their respective titles – engaging in something of a violent race to find some potential buried treasure first.
The Western setting here is an unconventional one, given it takes place in Manchuria during the 1930s, but the iconography and some of the character types found here do feel Western-y (for lack of a better word). The Good, the Bad, the Weird is also pretty wild and bombastic as an action movie, it functions as a comedy a good deal of the time, and then there’s also a meanness/cynicism to it, the movie somehow doing this all at once, without it ever feeling too inconsistent or muddled.
7 'Eddington' (2025)
Sheriff Joe Cross and Mayor Ted Garcia at arguing on a main street in EddingtonImage via A24
Even if you like Eddington, you can probably agree with the idea that it’s a mess, but then again, it’s about messy times. Messy, recent times, actually. It’s set during 2020, and explores COVID-19-related madness in a small desert town, which is where the Western feel comes in. It’s got a Western setting, but being set so recently, it’s also clearly a neo-Western. Tackling that kind of thing at this stage, when it's still pretty raw... yeah, it took guts, for better or worse.
On top of all that, Eddington is darkly funny, but it’s also incredibly downbeat, cynical, and unwilling to offer any sort of easy answers about a chaotic time in history that, in all honesty, still feels like it’s kind of going, to some extent. It’s another nightmarish Ari Aster film, even though it technically verges away from the horror genre more than any of his other movies (including the surreal semi-horror adventure/comedy film that was Beau Is Afraid).
6 'The Revenant' (2015)
The men crossing the river in The Revenant.Image via 20th Century Studios
There’s an equal amount of beauty and bloodshed in The Revenant, which is about surviving the most awful of physical conditions and living for the sole purpose of getting vengeance. The main character, Hugh Glass, is mauled by a bear, loses everything he cares about, and is then left for dead, but being left for dead isn't the same as dying, which the newly established enemies of Glass learn the hard way.
The story is simple, but the filmmaking and all the technical qualities on offer are what make The Revenant feel particularly ambitious as a Western film.
It's sort of an action movie about revenge, though there are long stretches without too much action and The Revenant is – not necessarily in a bad way – willing to take its time. The story is simple, but the filmmaking and all the technical qualities on offer are what make The Revenant feel particularly ambitious as a Western film (and a non-traditional Western, too, given the setting and the overall feel).
5 'Stagecoach' (1939)
John Wayne as The Ringo Kid standing in an open field in Stagecoach.Image via United Artists
It might not have been the first great Western, and you could also argue that John Ford and John Wayne made better ones later in their respective careers, but Stagecoach is a pretty monumental film for the genre overall. It was technically ahead of its time, and there is a level of spectacle here that still makes it an emotionally engaging watch after so many decades.
Narratively, it’s simple, being a bit of a “journey from A to B” sort of film, but all the characters who are made to travel together on the titular stagecoach serve to keep it interesting. Stagecoach did things that were exciting for its time, and ultimately influential, so taking its age into account – and that sense of it being forward-thinking – the ambition here can certainly be admired quite easily.
4 'Once Upon a Time in the West' (1968)
Once Upon a Time in the West is phenomenal around, and earns the right to have such a broad title. It might not be the definitive Western, since picking just one movie to be that is basically impossible, but there’s an argument to be made that this is the one. It’s got several prominent characters whose lives intertwine (as do some of their pasts), and all the drama plays out against the backdrop of the final days of the Old West.
Well, maybe the final years. Things are winding down, sometimes going out with a bang, while other things (and people) die out slowly. It’s all that without being a total downer, too. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of several movies that demonstrate how Sergio Leone really was one of the best directors of all time (no hyperbole, it’s just the truth).
3 'Heaven's Gate' (1980)
James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) stand side by side by their homestead in 'Heaven's Gate' (1980)Image via United Artists
After The Deer Hunter, which tackled the Vietnam War, Michael Cimino made something even bigger (and more controversial) with Heaven’s Gate, which was torn apart at the time, but is viewed more favorably now. It’s still a messy film, and far from perfect, but there’s spectacle here for sure, as well as an impressive cast, and a story about wealth disparity and class warfare that ends up being rather engaging at times.
It's also about as grand as epic-scale films got, at the time, which is part of the reason why Heaven’s Gate was infamous. The film’s production went on and on, got too big according to some, and then it never really had a shot at being properly appreciated, divorced from the controversy and talk surrounding its production. But nowadays, people are less concerned about that, and Heaven’s Gate has been justifiably re-evaluated.
2 'The Wild Bunch' (1969)
Intense man with a gun in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969)Image via Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
One year after Once Upon a Time in the West, another Western that felt like it could’ve marked the end point of the genre came out: The Wild Bunch. Rather than being bittersweet, The Wild Bunch was brazenly more concerned with being bitter, and did so while also feeling nihilistic and willing to be about as violent as mainstream films got, by 1960s standards. “Uncompromising” is a word that only goes so far here, when you compare it to other Westerns (especially the non-spaghetti ones) at the time.
The Wild Bunch is visceral and bloody, and tells a grim story about aging outlaws dealing with the collapse of a way of life they used to thrive in. It’s a movie about getting old, or feeling the world continue to turn without you, and deciding to go out on your own terms in retaliation. It still hits hard, and represented Sam Peckinpah (himself an almost always bold filmmaker) at his most confident.
1 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' (1966)
Image via Produzioni Europee Associati
Not just a masterful Western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly could well be one of the very best movies of all time, from any genre. It’s such an immense production, too, because every scene goes a little bigger and more epic in feel than the last, and the whole thing starts pretty big, too. It’s just that Sergio Leone never stops being willing to build on each and every big sequence.
This means that, after all the pieces are in place/have been established, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly never really lets up, and it’s up there among the most perfectly-paced movies of all time, too. You can’t really go wrong with anything here, and for it to be so funny, intense, epic, moving (in a surprising way), adventurous, and willing to be a war movie on top of a Western (at least briefly)… it’s so much, but it all comes together so remarkably well.
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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Western
Release Date
December 29, 1967
Runtime
161 minutes
Director
Sergio Leone
Cast
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Clint Eastwood
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Eli Wallach
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