There’s a reason that, seven decades after its original release, audiences and filmmakers alike are still wowed by Johnny Guitar and all its colorfully ambitious histrionics.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 25, 2024

Nicholas Ray’s gaudy masterpiece the almost “too modern for me” psychological wowser... a stylized, poetic Western like no other... Want to talk hot, burning Trucolor? Want to talk blurred gender roles? Let’s talk Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jul 4, 2024

Johnny Guitar is a classic, and god knows it has camp value, but it’s not exactly a “camp classic.” Its excesses are all very deliberate, not some accident of ineptitude or bad taste.

| Sep 20, 2023

Johnny Guitar has the benefit of featuring a performance from the greatest movie star of all time. Whenever Joan Crawford shows up in a film, you know that she is going to command your attention and Nicholas Ray seems to be aware of the fact.

| Feb 1, 2023

Episode 36: Love in the Time of Monsters / Barbarella / Welcome to the Dollhouse / Johnny Guitar

| Original Score: 65/100 | Oct 3, 2021

Ray's film is a western, but it is also an amplified melodrama, with a rich seam of deviant psychology just waiting to be disinterred from its dusty surface. Its time has come.

| Sep 20, 2021

Johnny Guitar is not really a Western, nor is it an 'intellectual Western'. It is a Western that is dream-like, magical, unreal to a degree, delirious.

| Feb 1, 2021

While I won't say that I loved the film (it retains enough of its genre's tropes to not quite work for me), I was surprised by how glorious the sets and landscapes looked.

| Jan 24, 2019

Double-crosses, beautiful losers, gunplay and waterfalls and fire and whiskey, it's all here.

| Sep 6, 2018

Mildred Pierce unleashed on the wild, wild West.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 25, 2018

A cheap Western from Republic Pictures, yes. And also one of the boldest and most stylized films of its time, quirky, political, twisted.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 24, 2018

This baroque bonanza fascinates on so many levels that it demands to be repeatedly viewed and reviewed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2018

Compared to other Westerns, Johnny Guitar is high art--richly atmospheric and with noir elements that will remind viewers of such dramatic films as Key Largo.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 16, 2018

Joan Crawford's Vienna is the most masculine of women western heroes. A former saloon girl who earned her way to owning her own gambling house, she's a mature woman with a history and she's not ashamed of what she did to carve out her claim for a future.

| Aug 4, 2017

Not too many westerns culminate in a six-gun showdown between two women -- but then Nicholas Ray wasn't your average filmmaker.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2017

When Crawford pulls a gun, her authority is so complete that she doesn't even come across as a woman in male drag; she owns it on her own terms.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 6, 2016

Feminism, Freud and firearms all figure in this exemplary yarn that also takes aim at the blacklisting that was tearing apart the film industry.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 2, 2016

Unforgettably strange and brilliant.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 5, 2016

A movie for anyone who's ever been judged on their appearance, their outlook or the way they choose to live.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 3, 2016

Nicholas Ray's overwhelming ballad

| Jan 31, 2016