The Improbability of Communication in ‘The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez’
The inability to communicate truthfully and accurately runs like a red thread through the course of Robert M. Young's western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.
The inability to communicate truthfully and accurately runs like a red thread through the course of Robert M. Young's western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.
In the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, there's something altogether new about having revisionist western ideas filtered through their rich sense of character, black comedy, and their penetrating awareness of humanity's fatal imperfections.
Jacques Audiard's revisionist Western shines thanks to moral quandaries and John C. Reilly's performance.
It's not enough to describe Dead Man as simply an anti-western; it's an iconoclastic deconstruction of late 19th Century American values and mores, many of which remain unabated more than a century later.
Lisa Hanawalt's work is proof that even a genre as seemingly played-out as the western can reveal a rich landscape if the right hands are holding the reins.
Throughout his career, Fairbanks scrubbed his scripts of racist elements. The Half-Breed is a rare example when racism is foregrounded as a theme.
Exteriors and interiors in The Hanging Tree are staged with compositions that layer different elements across their own planes of foreground and background, while interiors parcel dark and light according to the nature of the characters.
Loo Hui Phang emphasizes the nature of image-making from the first panel: an upside landscape as viewed through the inverting lens of the protagonist's camera.
Sibling directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarin deliver vastly different stories about the power of the past.
In this tale of the formation of Texas, a roof over one's head is antithetical to freedom.