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    • western
    | Feb. 25, 2017, 7:16 p.m.
    Ennio Morricone knows more about effectively building suspense than director Giulio Petroni in Death Rides a Horse. Where the camera lingers on a scene two beats too long, the score murmurs, pulses and chants in sort of futile compensation. It joins Superfly among the films where the score is the main saving grace. There’s a boy, Bill, who watched bandits shoot his father dead and then murder his mother and sister after a gang rape. He only sees the face of the leader, but glimpses tell tale clues for the others: a tattoo of four aces; a spur;
    • comedy
    • western
    | July 16, 2017, 1:29 p.m.
    By 1971 the American Western was in a pathetic state. The genre’s chokehold on television was lessening, Gunsmoke and Bonanza had just a few years left in prime time. Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah exploded the whole traditional notion of a Western. The former opening the floodgates to knock-off Spaghetti flicks, and the latter introducing a gore and a moral hardness that seemed contrary to the whole attitude of the classic cowboy film. John Wayne, and Joel McCrea were pumping out formulaic Westerns, paeans to a bygone era that felt hopelessly out of touch with their time. The young
    • western
    | Dec. 3, 2018, 1:38 a.m.
    For the Coen Brothers' first film for a digital distribution service they deliver a minor pleasure. Anthology films are rarely the stuff of greatness, a limitation of the format. The Coens use six Western stories to frame stark depictions of intergenerational conflict. Neither the young nor the old are any holier than the other.
    • western
    | June 23, 2018, 11:38 a.m.
    John Wayne trades an ungrateful generation for the youth of tomorrow in a do-or-die cattle drive while being trailed by a gang of bandits.