For many, many decades. The Western was revered as king, and rightly so. The journey began in 1903 with The Great Train Robbery and by 1959, eight of the 10 most-watched shows towed that line. In cinemas and on the big screen, John Wayne and Henry Fonda weren’t alone when it came to gunslinging, as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, and even Elvis Presley had their fair share. After a period of stalling and decline, the Western genre would experience a new dawn as Dances With Wolves opened in theaters in 1990, scoring at the box office and winning seven Oscars. Kevin Costner earned wins for Best Picture and Best Director in the epic Western film.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and the genre is very much alive and thriving, with several filmmakers splashing drama and morality plays on the wide-open canvas of the Western genre, albeit with varying degrees of success. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino have made their mark on the big screen with titles like Django Unchained proving quite memorable. Jordan Peele‘s third directorial feature, Nope, and Jeymes Samuel‘s electrifying directorial debut, The Harder They Fall, have brought exciting new variety to an ever-enduring genre. However, there are some titles unto which many modern Westerns turn to in hopes of drawing varied degrees of inspiration and hope. One of them is poised to become a free streaming gem.
Sydney Pollack is sometimes overlooked and is not always given the respect that he deserves as being one of the greatest filmmakers in history, and that disregard might stem from the fact that he worked with such a diverse number of genres. One defining part of Pollack’s filmography is his frequent collaborations with Robert Redford, and under Pollack’s guidance, Redford delivered one of his best performances ever in the survival thriller Jeremiah Johnson, which is now streaming for free on Tubi. Looking back, Tarantino, who has an eye for these things, in 2009 in an interview with Parade, compared Brad Pitt‘s status as a major movie star and his physical presence on set in Inglourious Basterds to Redford during that time. Jeremiah Johnson is viewed as one of the best Westerns of all time and the fact that Redford replaces Clint Eastwood, a legend in his own right, is further testament to Redford’s performance.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
What Is ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ About?
Based on an incredible true story,Jeremiah Johnson follows Redford, who plays a legendary Mexican-American war veteran who decides to isolate himself from the rest of society by becoming a mountain man making a home in the Rocky Mountains. At this time, America had become a more expansive nation through the acquisition of new territories,but the absence of legitimate governments in many territories meant men like Johnson had the freedom of exploration. The established mountain man, Bear Claw Chris Lapp (Will Geer), teaches Johnson his trade and later on, Johnson falls in love with the Indigenous woman Swan (Delle Bolton), whom he marries while setting aside his brutal past. However, when the life of his young family is put in danger when a feud with a rival tribe begins to boil over, Johnson is forced to return to the violent ways he thought he had left behind forever.
