Frontier

1985 · Larry McMurtry · 843 pages · Western / Literary Fiction

Lonesome Dove is the great American Western novel, an 843-page cattle drive that turns out to be about friendship, regret, and the passing of an entire way of life. It earns every one of its pages.

2004 · 3 Seasons · HBO · Western / Drama

Deadwood takes the mythology of the American frontier and replaces it with mud, profanity, and some of the most extraordinary dialogue ever written for television. Ian McShane's Al Swearengen is an all-time great character brought to life by an all-time great performance, and the ensemble around him matches that standard with startling consistency. The show's density and cancellation after three seasons are legitimate drawbacks that cost it the ending it deserved on its original run. What exists across those 36 episodes is still a remarkable achievement, a show that found poetry in the ugliest corners of American history and never once flinched.

1990 · Kevin Costner · 181 min · Western / Drama

Dances with Wolves is a three-hour epic that bet on patience, subtitles, and open prairie, and walked away with seven Academy Awards including Best Picture. Kevin Costner's directorial debut sends a Civil War officer to an abandoned frontier post, where his slow friendship with a Lakota band becomes one of Hollywood's great immersion stories, carried by John Barry's soaring score and photography that makes South Dakota look like scripture. Decades of debate about its white-outsider framing and its infamous Oscar win over a certain gangster classic have complicated its standing without erasing its power. Few films this long feel this unhurried on purpose.