Movie Review: 3:10 To Yuma

Every director should make at least one Western. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care if they’re in vogue or out, whether they make money or not. If you hope to be worth a damn behind the camera, you need one Western under your belt. Landscapes, violence, sweat, grit, faces with evil intentions or grimy fear, moral peril. It encourages you to use every last damn bit of your frame and start seeing things from an ethical perspective, as opposed to just moving your characters around a stale plot like so many chess pieces. If you can make one, you can make any other kind of movie you set your brain on. There is more than one reason to mourn the latter-day death of the Western. Guys like Sergio Leone were the last guys who thought big and didn’t crop and truncate their images for that all too lucrative home video market.

James Mangold is now officially worth a damn. I won’t bestow Grand Master privileges on him just quite yet, because he did after all inflict Kate & Leopold on us. But 3:10 To Yuma finds Mangold at his best and most composed. This is a film that takes its time, lets us get to know the people and the situation, and only reveals to us what the movie is REALLY about in the last half hour...continue reading this review at Geeks of Doom!