The Western Revisited Sunday Brunches

Scottish director John Maclean’s gloriously off-kilter western looked at the classic American genre through the eyes of an outsider with its jack-rabbit caught in a den of wolves tale about a young man’s travels from the cold shoulder of Scotland into the baking heart of America, to find his love.

Mads Mikkelsen does what a man’s gotta do in Kristian Levring’s gripping Western tale of hate, murder and revenge on the pioneer trail, which injected a Danish twist on that most American of genres.

Intimate in detail but epic in implication, Kelly Reichardt’s beautiful and eerily poetic alt-Western defied the abiding Western mythology to privilege women’s experience in its telling of the tale of a 19th century wilderness guide who led three young couples and their children toward the new frontier of America's West.

This slow-burning, but gripping and meticulously observed picture about the 1882 murder of legendary outlaw Jesse James marked a high point for the modern western in its tremendously stylish, intelligent retelling of the archetypal western myth.