The Best 25 Western Movies in History According to Stacker

For decades, the most popular movie genre in America was the Western. Audiences loved gun-slinging sheriffs, dashing outlaws, thundering cattle drives, horseback pursuits, and majestic landscapes. That love ran so deep that more Westerns were produced in the 1950s than all other genres combined. And while the Western has attracted substantially smaller crowds in the decades since, it continues to hold a persistent appeal. Early Westerns set the standard with cowboys played by the likes of Gary Cooper and John Wayne before spaghetti Westerns—products of the Italian film industry in the '60s and '70s—came along and demythologized the conventions and traditions canonized by those first iterations. More modern Westerns subvert the genre standards even more in that they tend to be more romantic and thoughtful; think "Hell or High Water" and "First Cow." Here are Stacker's picks for the top 25 Westerns of all time.