Western films are a pillar of nice American cinema. Evoking the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, many classics of the style hail from ’50s motion flicks to ’60s spaghetti westerns to fashionable entries like 3:10 to Yuma and, extra lately, Killers of the Flower Moon.
There is one other movie within the dialog of greatest western movies by movie critics – Brokeback Mountain. The New York Times listed the Oscar successful 2005 on their listing of favourite westerns since 2000. Ang Lee’s adaptation of a brief story about thwarted love noticed A-listers Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as cowboys who meet one summer time within the Nineteen Sixties when they’re employed to herd sheep on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.
“The lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee’s epic western, Brokeback Mountain, is as bone deep as the movie’s heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident,” praised Stephen Holden in The New York Times’ 2005 evaluation.
“It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.”
Twenty years later, the movie continues to be extremely rated by common viewers. On Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of critics’ critiques are optimistic, with an 82% approval ranking by members. It has a 4.1 ranking out of 5 on Letterboxd.
Rotten Tomatoes’ critic consensus states: “A beautiful, epic Western, Brokeback Mountain’s love story is imbued with heartbreaking universality thanks to moving performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.”
New York Times praised Ledger, who “magically and mysteriously disappears” within the pores and skin of his character while Gyllenhaal’s ache and disappointment registers in his “sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes”.
The film is predicated on a brief story by Annie Proulx initially revealed in The New Yorker in 1997. It has been adopted right into a play for the London West End and opera of the identical title.
“Brokeback Mountain is far more than a gay western,” wrote Rick Moody in 2005 in a evaluation for The Guardian. “It’s a great American love story.”
Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams play the leads’ wives because the movie follows cowboys’ fraught love story through the years.
Is Brokeback Mountain a western movie?
Entertainment Weekly’s rating of the 35 greatest Western films from 1990 to 2024 positioned Brokeback Mountain in fifth place, dubbing it an “essential” inclusion on their listing.
“Though far from a Western in terms of structure, Brokeback Mountain is a powerfully emotional look at the model of American masculinity and the cowboy, and how that model fails two men completely,” the publication famous.
“Anchored by four stellar performances from Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway, the film is an essential entry in the genre, regardless of its utter lack of shoot-outs.”
They upheld the film’s standing as a western movie, including: “Anyone doubting Brokeback’s status as a Western should note that the script was penned by Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry and his co-writer, Diana Ossana.”
https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/2061782/best-western-film-netflix-streaming-movie