Best Westerns of This Decade (So Far)

The Just Westerns YouTube channel shares a breakdown of its top Western films and TV shows released between 2020 and 2025.

There's plenty of great material here to add to your "must watch" list.

Sergio Leone's Landscape of Faces

After the success of the Dollars trilogy, Sergio Leone was told by the studio he had to direct one more Western. What he created, may be the greatest western, and one of the greatest films of all time. Deemed too long and slow for audiences, Leone perfectly utilized the nothingness of western life, causing scenes to move almost painfully slow, but in the most beautiful way.

Clint Eastwood's Favourite (And Least Favourite) Westerns

Eastwood doesn't talk about Westerns like a critic — he talks about them like a guy who's seen it all. He'll praise a flop the studio buried, trash his own movie so hard he nearly walked away from acting, and call The Ox-Bow Incident a masterpiece after his own producers called it worthless. These are the Westerns Eastwood calls the best ever made — and two he wishes he never touched.

Django & Django (2021)

Django & Django is an 80-minute documentary looking at the history of Italian/Spaghetti Westerns and their influence on Quentin Tarantino's 2012 Django Unchained (available in the UK on Sky Documentaries as well as being a bonus feature on the recent blu-ray release of Django).

The primary focus of the piece, presented largely as a casual conversation with Quentin Tarantino (occasionally intercut with a few other talking heads), is his admiration for the work of the late Sergio Corbucci (aka The Other Sergio or The Second Best Spaghetti Western Director).

Tarantino is seemingly given free rein to enthuse over a genre he clearly loves in his trademark style of blending his encyclopaedic film knowledge with limitless child-like enthusiasm:

"Of all the great Western directors, Corbucci created the most pitiless West that there was. The most pitiless, the most pessimistic, the most surrealistically grotesque, the most violent."

While Tarantino does detail how Corbucci's body of work helped shape Django Unchained, he graciously devotes the main thrust of the presentation to discussing Corbucci's ultra-violent Western oeuvre of the 1960s and early '70s: Django, The Great Silence, The Specialists, Navajo Joe, The Mercenary, Sonny and Jed etc

Although Corbucci only (obviously) appears in archival footage, this Italian production manages to interview the charismatic Franco Nero (who played Django in the original 1966 movie) and, a year before he died, Ruggero Deodato, who was assistant director on Django before helming the infamous Cannibal Holocaust in 1980.

A fascinating watch for fans of the genre, 80-minutes feels too short a time to listen to Tarantino and dissect the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Corbucci... and yet some of the documentary seems a bit self-indulgent.

There's a couple of overly long 'behind-the-scenes' sequences without dialogue and commentary, which are superficially interesting but lack real context and meaning.

However, for me, the worst offence was the documentary's "prologue" (the film is broken up into chapters, naturally), which is a make-believe "deleted scene" from Tarantino's Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood that hijacks and reimagines a real story about a young Burt Reynolds interacting with Corbucci, but attributes it to Tarantino's character, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Maybe it's because I'm no fan of Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood  (for me it's Tarantino's weakest movie, but what do I know?), but this felt like an unnecessary introduction to the subject of the documentary.

Conversely, the film wraps up with a wonderful experiment in the creation of headcanon as Tarantino kicks around an idea for who Django (a Northern soldier in the Civil War) had come South to find, and ultimately seek brutal revenge on behalf of.

As far as I am concerned, Tarantino's headcanon is now my headcanon for Django's backstory.