The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: The Killing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Ten Commandments

There are two John Fords: the pioneering genre enthusiast who straddled two distinct filmmaking eras, indulging old west mythologies along the way, and the more interrogative, post-war figure who reckoned with his wartime experiences and recalibrated Western iconography and narrative. Both Fords left an indelible mark on the medium, birthing icons, cementing legacies, and inspiring future filmmakers along the way, but the latter boasts a more fascinating oeuvre, weaving weighty, post-war introspection through history and legend.

Ford's cinema is the cinema of romance and death, which is to say it's quintessentially American. My Darling Clementine took that most legendary of Old West shootouts, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and used it to explore the sense of death and injustice that had lingered in the aftermath of the Second World War's conclusion. Similar themes were apparent in 1945's They Were Expendable (an explicit WW2 drama centred around the failed defence of the Philippines), with Ford later shifting his focus to an interrogation of American mythology and its long-running duel with the pain of the past.

Fort Apache, Wagon Master, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are three noteworthy examples from that era (and they are each amazing films), but The Searchers, released in 1956 and starring John Wayne as bitter ex-Confederate Ethan Edwards, who embarks on a years-long, hate-filled quest for revenge against a Native American war party, is the technical and thematic highpoint of Ford's filmmaking journey. An exorcism for Manifest Destiny, and a definitive parable of revenge.