10 Greatest Westerns Of The 21st Century

At their core, most Westerns tend to be glorified re-tellings of popular Old West myths, with the truth occasionally twisted in order to make it more dramatically enticing.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was sold almost entirely on name value (it certainly wasn’t sold on title brevity), and the assumption that most people were familiar with the titular assassination and the characters in question.

This serves as an accessible jumping off point for a story about idol worship, as The Assassination focuses more on the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, and the events that led up to Jesse James's eventual demise.

The whole thing is shot like a moving postcard, and is backed up by two stellar performances from Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck as James and Ford. It plays out rather like the portrait of two killers, both as different from each other as they are similar.