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.

Eastwood’s masterful and dark deconstruction of the western myth (he also directed the film) and his own Man With No Name persona, is like a fine vintage to be savoured. Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman deliver excellent support in arguably the best western movies of the 1990s – and one of the best movies from that period full-stop.

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.