The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Hollywood is far from done with the Western, but now it only lives on as a kind of procession of the walking dead, in savage meditations on the decline of the age of the outlaw and the disappearance of the frontier. It's been swinging towards this for forty years, of course, since Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which really set the template that the likes of Unforgiven and all lesser derivatives have to nod to. So you can't really call modern Westerns revisionist in any meaningful sense: they're just revisitors to a familiar country where the heroic myth is already taken as a sham anachronism.
All this doesn't mean that there isn't still room for a great Western. The Assassination of Jesse James is very nearly one: Brad Pitt occupies the centre assuredly as the increasingly beleaguered bandit with whom it stretches your kindness to see him as merely utilitarian rather than just sociopathic, and the film's dialogues feel genuinely fresh, which is a hard enough act given the weight of genre convention. Ultimately, though, it all has to serve second fiddle to Roger Deakins's cinematography: I'm hard pushed to remember anything in the same class in recent years and certainly nothing to surpass it. Frame after frame just seems like a painting.

8/10