It’s a great time to be alive! We have all of the world’s information at our fingertips. We have the Wendy’s Frosty. We have the ability to summon food with an app the way a witch can summon a friendly demon. We also have movies! Movies of all kinds, endless amounts of movies, more than 20 genres and hundreds of subgenres. Enough movies to last us a lifetime if you tried to watch them all back to back, which can be overwhelming. That’s what we’re here for, to help with the conundrum of what country movie you should be watching. That’s why we’ve listed the 11 best country movies of all time.
How does one describe a “country movie?” To be honest, it’s a broad term, but it does have its characteristics. When we say country movie, we’re talking about films that follow themes or settings associated with what’s referred to as rural life, like the Bible Belt, or a small town or the countryside. Usually it’s about the heartland, where instead of huge explosions we have, well we still have explosions but they’re mostly dynamite based.
We’re talking about characters who have a real connection to the land or their community. Country movies are full of people who like hard work, God, family and tradition. Some of them are westerns, some are tales of hardship and some just exist to remind us of another time in the world before things got so complicated. Let’s take a look at the best 11 of all time, in no particular order.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Another Coen Brothers classic, this one is set in Depression-era Mississippi. Three convicts escape prison and embark on a journey loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey. George Clooney stars as the charismatic Ulysses Everett McGill, and along with the help of Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), he wants to make it back to his wife before she remarries. The soundtrack is also killer.
Crazy Heart
Heartbreaking, masterful, and almost perfect, Crazy Heart is about a washed up alcoholic country singer named Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges), who forms a connection with a young journalist and her son. He’s forced to reckon with his own demons, and Bridges turns in the performance of a lifetime making Blake relatable and likable despite some of the terrible things he does, including one incredibly tense scene where he loses the kid in a mall because he wanted to drink.
Coal Miner’s Daughter
Sissy Spacek won an Academy Award for her portrayal of country music icon Loretta Lynn in this 1980 classic. It shows her very humble upbringing in rural Kentucky to her eventual breakthrough in the music industry, with all the trials and tribulations one meets along the way. It’s a story of love and resilience and the strength of the human spirit in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds.
The Great Train Robbery
The Great Train Robbery has been remade numerous times since it was first released in 1903, but this silent film classic laid the groundwork for all the Westerns that came after it. The editing was leagues ahead of its time, and it told a thrilling tale of the Old West in a (then-) brand new medium.
Unforgiven
Clint Eastwood both directed and starred in this ’90s classic, about an aged former gunslinger turned farmer who is forced to return to his old ways due to financial constraints. Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman turn in career-defining performances in a film that explores the depth of human depravity despite the desire to leave your past behind.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ushered in a new era of both movies and Westerns. Director George Roy Hill abandoned the so-called rules of the genre and added unorthodox scenes filled with whimsy and popular music from the time. It also didn’t hurt that it starred two of the most popular actors of their day: Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A Sergio Leone classic, Clint Eastwood plays Blondie, a gunfighter searching for treasure in a race against two others who want it first. It’s an unforgettable, classic film with an epic score and perfectly staged tension. The gunfights are iconic and the film is truly a testament to the genre, and Eastwood turns in one of his best performances in his six-decade career.
True Grit
A remake of an old John Wayne movie, True Grit was rebooted by the Coen Brothers, who pulled off the impossible task of improving the original. Jeff Bridges plays a curmudgeonly, past-his-prime alcoholic gunfighter who agrees to help a young girl (Hailee Steinfeld) get revenge on her father’s killer (Josh Brolin). Aided by a Texas Ranger (Matt Damon), the unlikely trio traverse the heartland in search of their goal.
Django Unchained
A Quentin Tarantino picture that’s both thoughtful and exceedingly violent, Django Unchained centers around freed slave turned bounty hunter Django (Jamie Foxx) as he burns a path through the south trying to rescue his wife from an evil, eccentric plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). In the process, he teams up with a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) and leaves a trail of blood and bodies in his wake.
Blazing Saddles
This classic Mel Brooks comedy is probably best known for a classic fart joke, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a satirical take on the Western that’s really smart, and often rip roaringly hilarious. The plot involves a shady politician (Harvey Korman) who wants to put a railroad through a small town, destroying it in the process. The town’s sheriff (Cleavon Little) teams up with Jim the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) to foil his plans, and irreverent hijinks ensue.
No Country for Old Men
Based on a phenomenal novel by the late Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men tells the story of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a war veteran who randomly discovers the aftermath of a drug deal gone deadly and a briefcase full of cash. He takes the money and ends up being hunted by a merciless assassin (Javier Bardem) who was hired to get the money back. It’s full of surprising twists and turns, and it seeps with a poetic realism that’s simultaneously hauntingly beautiful and terrifying.
