Rio Bravo

Underrated at the time of its release, this majestically paced western is one of the finest achievements of the genre and stands as a career-best for many of its participants.

Warm, witty and endlessly welcoming, not only is it the filmmaker's finest Oater -- better even than the sparkling Red River -- it's arguably the quintessential Hawks flick.

A definitive piece of Americana by way of Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo is what the late 1950s studio system was all about

The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission.

To watch Rio Bravo is to see a master craftsman at work. The film is seamless. There is not a shot that is wrong. It is uncommonly absorbing, and the 141-minute running time flows past like running water.