11 Masterpiece Neo-Western Movies That Rewrote the Rules of the Genre

Ask anyone to name a Western, and they will probably picture dust, a sheriff, a saloon, and Clint Eastwood squinting into a sun that’s personally offended him. The classic Western had its golden age, burned bright, and eventually collapsed. By the mid-1970s, the genre was more or less on life support, left to the revisionist directors and the Italians and the odd auteur willing to poke at the corpse. But then, filmmakers stopped trying to revive the Western and started using it as a skeleton. They stripped the setting, but kept the soul. That’s the neo-Western.