No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are among the greatest Westerns of the 2000s. The Western genre has been beloved for decades and the modern era of cinema has contributed some great movies to Western cinema.

The arrival of films like The Proposition, True Grit, 3:10 to Yuma, and No Country for Old Men breathed new life into the cherished western genre, captivating a new generation of viewers.

The history of movie Westerns more or less begins with the end of the Old West itself. Westerns thrived in the silent era, and though the genre’s popularity has ebbed and flowed ever since — largely fading from view in the ’80s but enjoy several resurgences in succeeding decades — it’s never threatened to fade away.

As one of the longest-running American genres, Westerns continue to hold their reign with films like ‘True Grit,’ ‘Tombstone’ and ‘Django Unchained.’ Western films have been a staple of American cinema for practically as long as movies have been made.