{"id":230206,"date":"2026-04-01T13:06:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T13:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/230206\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T13:06:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T13:06:22","slug":"presenting-the-best-texas-movies-of-all-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/230206\/","title":{"rendered":"Presenting the Best Texas Movies of All Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listen, I\u2019ve got no beef with John Wayne<\/a>. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, Rio Bravo<\/a>, True Grit\u2014all great movies. Admittedly, I probably haven\u2019t seen 1960\u2019s The Alamo<\/a> since a TV was wheeled into my fourth-grade Texas history class so we could watch Wayne pretend to be Davy Crockett<\/a>. Even back then\u2014even sitting among an indulgent audience of kids who were just grateful to take a break from memorizing the state\u2019s rivers\u2014I didn\u2019t find The Alamo to be particularly good. It\u2019s just too long, too riddled with inaccuracies, too padded with corny dialogue to be a great movie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But The Alamo has one thing going for it. It admirably evokes the feel of Texas, with big, booming, cannonball-size sentiments about defiance, nobility, and self-reliance that give you a sense of pride and belonging to something larger than yourself. When it comes to what makes a Texas movie, the feelings are crucial\u2014far more important than whether it was actually shot here (as opposed to in Utah or New Mexico) or stars any genuine Texans (Wayne was a Californian). It doesn\u2019t even matter if the director is Texan; some of the best Texas films were made by Yankees and Australians. Meanwhile the state has produced many great filmmakers, including Wes Anderson<\/a>, Robert Rodriguez<\/a>, and David Lowery<\/a>, all of whom have set and shot movies here yet none of whom have made what I would call a Texas movie. That\u2019s because a Texas movie isn\u2019t just a story that happens to take place here. It has to feel like Texas. It could never be set anywhere else.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This question of what makes a great Lone Star movie pops up every few years here at Texas Monthly. In 2011 the magazine convened a quorum of cultural experts to determine the ten greatest Texas films<\/a>. The Alamo didn\u2019t make the cut, of course. But the films that did\u2014including two other Wayne movies\u2014might arguably be taught in state history classes, so deftly do they capture something about the strong emotions and mythical forces that shaped us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Looking back at that 2011 list, I see several major themes. Red River, The Searchers<\/a>, and Giant<\/a> are stories of conquest, captained by stubborn, self-made men who assert their dominion over the wilderness only to be driven to Pyrrhic victories by their racism and rapacious greed. Hud<\/a>, The Last Picture Show<\/a>, and Tender Mercies<\/a> languish in the loneliness and ennui that were left behind once the frontier was finally tamed. Bonnie and Clyde<\/a>, Blood Simple<\/a>, No Country for Old Men, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/a> show how all that isolation became a breeding ground for violence and evil. They are all mandatory viewing for anyone hoping to better understand the Texas state of mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But those films are also history\u2014set in a Texas that increasingly feels as distant as the days of the Alamo and steeped in a frontier-minded version of the state. It\u2019s high time we expand that list\u2014and our notions of what constitutes a great Texas movie. Why now? Because hopefully we stand on the verge of a bright new era of Lone Star film. Last year the Legislature approved $1.5 billion in incentives<\/a> to be spent over the next ten years on attracting movie, TV, and gaming productions. It\u2019s an unprecedented investment; in addition to encouraging Hollywood filmmakers to bring their projects here, those grants give our homegrown directors, screenwriters, and actors greater impetus to tell their own stories right here, about the Texas that only they know.<\/p>\n

All of these films are singular visions, from Texans and non-Texans alike, that broaden our definition of our state and the \u201cTexas movie.\u201d Most of them are smaller in scope, more subdued in tone, and more modern in setting than the films in the 2011 list. But although they may shrink in the shadow of Giant and the like, every one of these movies reflects some essential truth about the state. Most important, they get the feeling right. In Texas, that\u2019s all that matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Lillian\"LillianLillian Gish in The Wind.Mary Evans\/All Film Archive\/Everett CollectionThe WindA silent movie that speaks volumes about Texas\u2019s unforgiving terrain.1928\u00a0<\/p>\n

At its core, the quintessential Texas movie is about the immortal conflict between humankind and nature, a war of attrition that this silent film summarizes with florid poetry: \u201cMan\u2014puny but irresistible\u2014encroaching forever on Nature\u2019s vastness, gradually, very gradually, wresting away her strange secrets, subduing her fierce elements\u2014conquers the earth!\u201d reads the opening title card. Such chest-beating aside, The Wind is less a hero\u2019s tale than a horror story. Lillian Gish stars as Letty, a Virginia na\u00eff who arrives in Sweetwater, in the godforsaken Texas plains, about forty miles west of Abilene, where the dust storms are said to drive people crazy (\u201cespecially women!\u201d). Swedish director Victor Sj\u00f6str\u00f6m (also known as Seastrom) films her ordeal like a rural Nosferatu whose monster is the harsh landscape. As the brutal northers, represented by ghostly white stallions, come pounding down from the mountains, Gish\u2019s eyes widen in liquid terror at the incessant sandstorms. Her only hope for survival is to marry one of the town\u2019s bachelors, violent oafs who whip out their guns at the slightest provocation. Setting a precedent for Giant and other Texas movies, The Wind\u2014which was based on the 1925 novel of the same title<\/a> by Dorothy Scarborough, who was born in East Texas and spent part of her childhood in Sweetwater<\/a>\u2014understandably drew the ire of locals who didn\u2019t appreciate the depiction of their home as a backwoods Hades. Still, as the Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie<\/a> wryly observed, their objections were only a \u201ctribute to its realism.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Zachary\"ZacharyZachary Scott in The Southerner.Everett CollectionThe SouthernerThe state\u2019s frontier spirit is tested\u2014and very nearly broken.1945\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGrow your own crops,\u201d a dying cotton picker tells Sam, an aspiring farmer played by Austin native Zachary Scott, near the beginning of The Southerner. His words inspire Sam to move his family to a piece of land in Texas, and that\u2019s pretty much where the inspirational stuff ends in this hardscrabble rural drama from the French director Jean Renoir. Sam\u2019s loved ones endure a year of near biblical torment, struggling through freezes and failed crops and barely scraping by on possum meat and well water borrowed from a neighbor who, contrary to the Texas credo of \u201cfriendship,\u201d openly seeks to ruin them. And just when their little farm finally seems to be taking off, the floods roll in. Much like The Wind, The Southerner plumbs the darker side of Texas\u2019s rugged individualism, but here it\u2019s shot through with the same humanism that Renoir, making one of his few Hollywood films, brought to his classics Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game. The resilience of Sam\u2019s family\u2014particularly that of his wife and mother, both of whom are uncommonly strong characters for stories of this era\u2014should give even the modern, jaded Texan a much deeper appreciation for everything their great-great-grandparents went through just to settle here, those absolute nutjobs. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Doris\"DorisDoris Hargrave and Sonny Carl Davis on the set of The Whole Shootin\u2019 Match.Courtesy of Watchmaker FilmsThe Whole Shootin\u2019 MatchA charming indie about two guys with dreams as big as the Texas sky.\u00a0 1978\u00a0<\/p>\n

Austin director Eagle Pennell<\/a>\u2019s low-budget, black and white feature debut arrived on the festival circuit barely a month before the premiere of the TV show Dallas<\/a>, offering a photonegative inverse of the glamorous, swaggering Texas that J.\u2009R. Ewing and co. would soon enshrine in the popular imagination. Filmed guerrilla-style around Austin for less than $30,000, The Whole Shootin\u2019 Match follows roustabouts Frank (Sonny Carl Davis<\/a>) and Loyd (Lou Perryman) as they bounce between stints of temporary employment and steady boozing, dreaming up get-rich-quick schemes and bemoaning their repeated failures to launch. Compared with most Texas-size epics, The Whole Shootin\u2019 Match feels almost claustrophobically small, like an Italian neorealist film that\u2019s been transplanted to the world of good ol\u2019 boys and pickup trucks. But as the title suggests, the themes are big, honking, universal things: This is simply the best movie ever made about that uniquely Texan human condition of being forced to measure one\u2019s life against the state\u2019s outsized mythos. Frank and Loyd, inspired by (and envious of) the generations of cattle wranglers and wildcatters before them, remain convinced that amassing their own outrageous fortunes is simply a matter of \u201cgetting your mind right.\u201d And their refusal to be licked, even when fate repeatedly proves them wrong, makes for a film that\u2019s both bleakly funny and quietly poignant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Kevin\"KevinKevin Costner (from left), Judd Nelson, and Sam Robards in Fandango.Everett CollectionFandangoKevin Costner cuts loose across West Texas in a comic elegy for gloriously wasted youth.1985\u00a0<\/p>\n

In movies such as The Last Picture Show, Hud, and What\u2019s Eating Gilbert Grape<\/a>, this state has long been a favorite backdrop for the coming-of-age story, where all of life\u2019s potential finds its metaphorical purchase in the wide-open skies\u2014or, if you prefer, its flat and barren plains. Both analogies could apply to Fandango<\/a>, a tale of Tex-istential crisis wrapped in a zany college comedy. Kevin Costner, in one of his earliest lead roles, plays the head of a gang of newly minted University of Texas grads who call themselves the Groovers. In the summer of 1971 they set out to delay their inevitable futures\u2014beginning with the threat of being drafted into Vietnam\u2014with one final rager of a road trip<\/a> through the West Texas desert. Writer-director Kevin Reynolds, a San Antonio native, based Fandango on his Baylor University years, and his film feels authentically imbued with the young Texans\u2019 love-hate relationship with their home state. \u201c[Texas] is wild .\u00a0.\u00a0. just like us,\u201d Costner tells his buddies, although the subtext is that for both Texas and the Groovers, that wildness is already disappearing. Fandango underlines this by having the gang spend a night inside the rotting facade of the Giant set<\/a>, in Marfa, the Texas of myth crumbling around them as they contemplate what\u2019s next.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Lou\"LouLou Perryman in Last Night at the Alamo.Cinecom Pictures\/PhotofestLast Night at the AlamoHouston friends stumble into the harsh morning after of the state\u2019s future.1983\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pennell reunited with his The Whole Shootin\u2019 Match cast of Davis, Perryman, and Doris Hargrave for this spiritual sequel set in a rapidly gentrifying Houston (and if I accomplish nothing else during my tenure at Texas Monthly, it will be nagging everyone to add both these movies to their watch lists). Last Night at the Alamo, released three years after Urban Cowboy<\/a>, similarly concerns itself with the clash between Texas\u2019s frontier past and its cold, mechanical present, which here is embodied by a beloved dive bar on the verge of being bulldozed to make way for a skyscraper. Speaking of obvious symbolism, Davis plays Cowboy, a big fish in a beer-filled pond who dreams of going to Hollywood to become the next John Wayne, confident that he\u2019s the real deal\u2014not some carpetbagging pretender like John Travolta. In the meantime, Cowboy strokes his ego by rallying his buddy, Claude (Perryman), and the other adoring barflies into making a quixotic last stand against the advancing armies of urbanization. Last Night at the Alamo\u2019s screenplay was written by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre\u2019s Kim Henkel<\/a>, and it ratchets up a similar, if far less homicidal, tension as it stumbles through twilight hours marked by drunken arguments and minor epiphanies. But the film is also an affecting, affectionate look at ordinary lives spent in rowdy desperation, and it deserves a prominent place on the continuum between The Last Picture Show and Richard Linklater\u2019s openly indebted movies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Teresa\"TeresaTeresa Taylor (center) in Slacker.Orion Pictures\/PhotofestSlackerThe spirit of Texas\u2019s rebellion ambles on in this tribute to aimless Austinites.1990\u00a0<\/p>\n

Richard Linklater<\/a>\u2019s dreamy, drifting ode to a now bygone Austin<\/a>, where the Houston-born director moved in his twenties, is usually excluded from lists of great Texas movies, much like the city itself is often separated from quote, unquote \u201creal Texas.\u201d But Slacker doesn\u2019t just belong to a proud lineage of movies, including Linklater\u2019s Dazed and Confused<\/a>, about restlessly brooding Texans. Beneath its discursively philosophical rambles about The Smurfs and the Kennedy assassination lies a uniquely incisive distillation of the Texan psyche: its mistrust of (and paranoia toward) the outside world; its stoic acceptance of violence; and, above all else, its supreme dislike of being told what to do. Sure, there are plenty of sleepy college towns out there where underemployed, overeducated young people sit around yakking in coffeehouses. But only one of them also happens to be the capital of a state founded by misfits, malcontents, and other obstinate folks who just wanted to be left the hell alone. And seeing as Slacker was filmed v\u00e9rit\u00e9-style, without a permit, on Austin streets in the years right before the city became a playground for rise-and-grind tech bros, Linklater\u2019s movie has also become an unexpected historical document, preserving the last remnants of another vanished Texas frontier.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The\"TheThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, 1986.Cannon Films\/AlamyThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2The cannibal capitalism of eighties Texas runs amok in this satirical splatter fest.1986\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right, I said Part 2. Tobe Hooper\u2019s sequel<\/a> to his genre-defining, Austin-film-scene-igniting classic doesn\u2019t enjoy nearly the same reputation as its predecessor; it\u2019s often dismissed by cinephiles and horror hounds alike as too gory or silly. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 deserves special recognition for emphasizing the Texas of its title: Here it\u2019s not just the lunatic fringe hidden along the farm roads that is bloodthirsty and deranged; the entire state has gone insane. Leatherface\u2019s family of murderous, chainsaw-wielding cannibals are just the most self-actualized of all the psychos, having moved their slaughterhouse into the big cities and monetized their kills with a booming chili business. With a script by Dallas\u2019s L.\u2009M. Kit Carson<\/a>, the sequel satirizes the distinctly eighties era of Texas, when our backwoods lawlessness began to rebrand itself as a more country-club-friendly breed of nihilism. Now the biggest threat facing the people-eating Sawyer clan is government regulation, along with the unhinged Texas Ranger who\u2019s hell-bent on taking them down. (He\u2019s played by Dennis Hopper, in a performance that makes his character in Blue Velvet look like a model of Alec Guinness\u2013level restraint.) Finally, their feud builds to a subterranean showdown beneath a crumbling amusement park themed around famous Texas battles, a not-so-subtle nod to the history of violence that\u2019s baked into the very bedrock.<\/p>\n

\"Jo\"JoJo Harvey Allen in True Stories.Warner Bros.\/PhotofestTrue StoriesAn outsider\u2019s view of a suburbanized Texas that\u2019s trying very hard to retain its singularity.1986\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis part of the country\u2019s been through a lot of changes,\u201d David Byrne says near the beginning of True Stories, a droll understatement that the former Talking Heads front man, making his directorial debut, follows with a crash course in Texas history from the age of the dinosaurs through cowboys and Comanches, all the way up to the founding of Texas Instruments<\/a>. The kinds of changes that Byrne\u2019s film captures are more subtle, though no less seismic: Filmed around what were then the outskirts of Dallas\u2013Fort Worth using a mostly local cast and crew, including a plum role for Lubbock legend Jo Harvey Allen<\/a>, True Stories documents the dorky, awkward adolescence of our suburban sprawl, when open fields began to blossom with manicured subdivisions and semiconductor factories, and the last vestiges of our distinct regional identities started to erode under the influence of shopping malls and MTV. True Stories, like Byrne\u2019s (possibly extraterrestrial) narrator, doesn\u2019t pass judgment on these shifts, nor does it reduce the quirky lives of \u201ca bunch of people in Virgil, Texas,\u201d to patronizing punch lines. Much like the fictional Virgil itself\u2014whose preparations for commemorating Texas\u2019s sesquicentennial with a festival saluting \u201c150 Years of Specialness\u201d give the film its loose narrative thread\u2014True Stories celebrates the individualism of lovably oddball characters like John Goodman\u2019s aspiring country singer. In doing so, it offers its own reassuring tribute to the philosophy, so key to the Texan character, that although the landscape around us may change and become homogenized, our iconoclastic spirit remains.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Holly\"HollyHolly Hunter. Debbe Edelstein\/HBO\/Courtesy Everett CollectionThe Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering MomProving the old saying that \u201cTexas is hell on women and horses,\u201d even in the age of minivans.1993\u00a0<\/p>\n

Based on the real story of Channelview homemaker Wanda Holloway<\/a>, who was convicted in 1991 of attempting to hire a hit man to kill the mother of her daughter\u2019s high school rival, this made-for-TV movie is a lot of things. It\u2019s a sharp satire of the tabloid culture of the early nineties, when Holloway and other \u201ccrazy\u201d women, like Amy Fisher and Lorena Bobbitt, were exploited for newspaper headlines and late-night jokes. It\u2019s a showcase for Holly Hunter at her absolute peak, with her barnstorming portrayal of Holloway\u2014all honey-dripping Southern politesse wrapped around a raging beehive of homicidal mania\u2014earning her an Emmy just a few months before she won the Oscar for The Piano. More than anything, Cheerleader-Murdering Mom is a shrewdly perceptive look at the way that Texas can be especially hard on women. As with Gish\u2019s character in The Wind, Holloway\u2019s descent into madness feels like a byproduct of her environment: She\u2019s driven to desperation not only by her patriarchal small Texas town\u2014which forces its women to cling to any modicum of power, even the petty hierarchies of high school cheerleading\u2014but also by the existential terrors that come from living next door to refineries that randomly burst into flames. The film doesn\u2019t ask you to forgive Holloway, but it does invite you to understand where she came from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Billy Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gary Gaines. Universal\/Photofest \"Tim Tim McGraw and Garrett Hedlund. Universal\/Photofest
\nFriday Night Lights2004\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s just get this out of the way: The TV show is better<\/a>, if only because any movie that hires Connie Britton then keeps her on mute for most of its running time is a lesser work. Nevertheless, director Peter Berg\u2019s first attempt at adapting Buzz Bissinger\u2019s book<\/a> about the Odessa Permian Panthers<\/a>\u2019 1988 almost championship season deserves its own special commendation, because it remains the best movie ever made about Texas\u2019s obsessive, symbiotic, occasionally ruinous relationship with football\u2014particularly high school football, which, in both the movie and in life, is less a sport than a sort of mass psychosis. \u201cGentlemen, the hopes and dreams of an entire town are riding on your shoulders,\u201d Panthers Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) tells his young charges. \u201cYou may never matter again in your life as much as you do right now.\u201d These lines, ostensibly meant to inspire, speak to the ludicrous pressures that are placed on these seventeen-year-old boys\u2014by their school, by the local boosters, by jaded parents whose only remaining glories are vicarious. They also foreshadow the inevitable cycle that will see those same players age into deeply unfulfilled adults themselves. Without the luxury of five seasons of character development afforded by Friday Night Lights the show<\/a>, the film feels smaller and bleaker in comparison. Still, the magic of Friday Night Lights the movie is in the way that all those nagging moral quandaries are forgotten in the excitement once the team takes the field, an experience not unlike watching football itself.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Jeff\"JeffJeff Bridges (left) and Gil Birmingham in Hell or High Water.CBS Films\/PhotofestHell or High WaterA classic cowboy yarn set amid the ruins of a weary, disenfranchised West.2016\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like a lot of Taylor Sheridan\u2019s work<\/a>, this lean, mean neo-western<\/a> traffics in archetypes that are as old and creaky as the past-his-prime Texas Ranger played by Jeff Bridges. The protagonists are a couple of classically noble outlaws\u2014hotheaded brothers, played by Ben Foster and Chris Pine, who rob a string of West Texas banks as revenge against an unjust system. Bridges\u2019s grizzled lawman, tasked with hunting down the brothers just days before his retirement, is a similarly righteous bastard, a shrewd and stubborn relic who can\u2019t help making racist digs at his Mexican and Native American partner (San Antonio native Gil Birmingham). A game of cat and mouse plays out across a Texas desert (actually New Mexico, but close enough) that\u2019s haunted by empires past: The script\u2019s working title, Comancheria, makes plain the parallels that Sheridan draws between generations of Texas lands stolen first with blood, then with bureaucracy. Yet even as Hell or High Water lingers elegiacally over shots of lonely pump jacks and decaying one-stoplight towns, the film avoids waxing overly romantic. (\u201c[It\u2019s the] twenty-first century, I\u2019m racing a fire to the river with a herd of cattle, and I wonder why my kids won\u2019t do this s\u2014 for a living!\u201d Sheridan himself quips in a cameo.) Instead, the film brings all those cowboy movie clich\u00e9s into an anxious new era, where even regular folks pack AR-15s and the ambient threat of horse thieves and Comanche raids has been replaced by more insidious crooks peddling reverse mortgages.<\/p>\n

\"Matthew Matthew McConaughey as Danny Buck in Bernie. Millennium Entertainment\/Cinematic Collection\/Alamy \"Shirley Shirley MacLaine and Jack Black in Bernie. Millennium Entertainment\/Alamy
\nBernie2011\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the early days of the movies, Texas was America\u2019s gladiatorial arena\u2014the backdrop for classic battles between good and evil, white hats versus black hats. Over time, however, the state has proved to be an even more fertile ground for exploring the gray areas that those simplistic morality plays tended to obscure. Bernie, adapted from a true crime tale<\/a> written by Texas Monthly\u2019s Skip Hollandsworth, delves into the ethical murk that surrounded East Texas mortician Bernie Tiede<\/a> (Jack Black), who was convicted in 1999 of murdering his elderly widowed companion, Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), three years earlier and hiding her body inside a deep freezer for almost nine months. Tiede\u2019s crime seems self-evidently evil. Yet Linklater\u2019s film is about the way that Tiede\u2019s many friends in his adopted hometown of Carthage managed to compartmentalize, rationalize, and even outright ignore their misgivings about his behaviors, up to and including homicide, simply because they liked him. \u201cYou cannot have grief tragically become a comedy,\u201d Tiede declares early in the movie, and Bernie repeatedly puts that assertion to the test. But comedy and tragedy, good and evil, right and wrong: The movie shows us that these things are not always so cut-and-dried as they may appear, just like people living in small-town Texas are much more complex than you might assume.<\/p>\n

\"Elizabeth\"ElizabethElizabeth Pe\u00f1a and Chris Cooper in Lone Star.Everett CollectionLone StarA twisty drama about the borders, both real and imagined, that keep us apart.1996\u00a0<\/p>\n

Writer-director John Sayles hails from upstate New York, a minor biographical detail that, depending on your biases, could lend a whiff of condescension to his assertion, as delivered in the opening scenes of Lone Star, that if \u201cyou live in a place, you should know something about it.\u201d Most Texans don\u2019t know all that much about Texas, the film suggests, because they cling to the legends that have always obscured them from seeing\u2014or allowed them to avoid\u2014the much uglier truths. In Lone Star, exposing that truth becomes deeply personal for Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), after the discovery of a sun-bleached skeleton in the fictional border town of Frontera reopens a decades-old mystery involving Deeds\u2019s locally revered father (Matthew McConaughey<\/a>) and the corrupt lawman (Kris Kristofferson<\/a>) he heroically deposed. But that whodunit is just a framework for the larger reckoning that Lone Star\u2019s characters are having with the past, as Texas\u2019s many unresolved racial tensions roil the fragile armistice of the present. At the center of these overlapping conflicts is Deeds\u2019s Mexican American love interest, Pilar (Elizabeth Pe\u00f1a), a headstrong high school teacher whose efforts to present a more complicated version of Texas history ruffles Anglo parents who accuse her of pushing \u201cpropaganda\u201d (a plotline that has somehow proved even more prescient in the thirty years since the film\u2019s release). While Deeds, Pilar, and the rest of Frontera dismantle the many lies that have shrouded their personal lives, the film likewise deconstructs the myths that continue to shape Texas\u2019s present. \u201cForget the Alamo,\u201d Pilar declares in the pugnacious closing line, which some may consider sacrilege. Yet the sentiment\u2014revoke the tyranny of the past and forge your own future\u2014is one that any Texan could get behind. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Boyd\"BoydBoyd Holbrook in Vengeance.Focus Features\/PhotofestVengeanceA fish-out-of-Whataburger comedy that both perpetuates and pokes fun at common Texas stereotypes.2022\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to Vengeance, Texans are football-and-rodeo-obsessed gun nuts who take our college rivalries way too seriously, who seek refuge from the emptiness of our surroundings by throwing ourselves full bore into violence, conspiracy theories, and drug abuse, and whose dull, desperate, borderline-illiterate lives are but a microcosm of the incipient crumbling of America itself. Yes, but as this black comedy presupposes, what if some Texans are also decent people? Vengeance stars The Office\u2019s B.\u2009J. Novak, who also wrote and directed the movie, as a snooty New York media type who gets roped into a West Texas murder mystery that he\u2019s hoping to exploit for a podcast. The film adopts its protagonist\u2019s elitist views of the state in order to deconstruct them. The portrait of Texas it paints isn\u2019t always flattering, but it\u2019s also far from simplistic. Novak spent time researching the region<\/a> with the help of former Texas Monthly writer Christian Wallace, and, in his desire to portray its residents honestly (and avoid getting hog-tied should he pass through here again), he avoids the easy stereotypes of evil rednecks and saintly rubes. Instead, Novak\u2019s character discovers that Texans aren\u2019t defined solely by their geography, their history, or even their love of Whataburger<\/a>. \u201cTexas invented vengeance,\u201d Novak is told. But as he soon discovers, there\u2019s a whole lot more to the story. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Bree\"BreeBree Elrod and Simon Rex in Red Rocket.A24\/PhotofestRed RocketA tragicomic trip into the industrial underbelly of Texas\u2019s Gulf Coast.2021\u00a0<\/p>\n

Director Sean Baker makes uniquely uncomfortable movies about overlooked Americans living on the margins, like the budget-motel
dwellers of The Florida Project or the highly paid sex workers of 2025\u2019s Best Picture\u2013winning Anora. But few of Baker\u2019s films are as squirm inducing as Red Rocket<\/a>. Filmed along the fringes of Texas\u2019s Gulf Coast, the movie tests the extremes of its audience\u2019s ability to empathize with a guy like Mikey \u201cSaber\u201d Davies (Simon Rex), a sleazy, washed-up porn star who slinks back to his hometown of Texas City<\/a>, then sets about grooming a seventeen-year-old girl (Suzanna Son). As with all of Baker\u2019s movies, Red Rocket neither condemns nor celebrates even its most reprehensible characters, whose ranks here include pimps, drug pushers, and con artists\u2014most of them played by locally scouted nonactors. Instead, Baker allows the viewer to discover, along with the other victims in Mikey\u2019s orbit, that they\u2019ve been charmed in spite of themselves. In much the same way, the film locates the cinematic allure in Galveston\u2019s Pleasure Pier and the twinkling chemical haze of Texas City\u2019s refineries. (\u201cMom calls that one Old Smokey,\u201d a character sighs wistfully over a flare stack.) Red Rocket isn\u2019t easy to watch; it\u2019s even more difficult to recommend. But it feels true, which is its own kind of beauty. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The Updated Canon
\nThe 25 Essential Texas Films<\/p>\n

What are the greatest Texas movies of all time? In 2011, Texas Monthly writer-at-large Christopher Kelly put that question to an expert panel: film critic John Bloom (a.k.a. Joe Bob Briggs<\/a>), screenwriters Anne Rapp<\/a> and Kyle Killen, University of Texas at Austin film studies professor Charles Ram\u00edrez Berg, and Alamo Drafthouse cofounder Tim League<\/a>. They came up with ten titles that they believed constituted the Texas canon. (Their selections were then echoed in a 2020 Texas Monthly column by the Texanist<\/a>, thus making them official.) Without daring to challenge that initial list, here we present an expanded compilation of great Texas movies, ordered by release date, with new additions in bold. After all, every canon could use a little extra fodder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2022 The Wind, 1928
\u2022 The Southerner, 1945
\u2022 Red River, 1948
\u2022 The Searchers, 1956
\u2022 Giant, 1956
\u2022 Hud, 1963
\u2022 Bonnie and Clyde, 1967
\u2022 The Last Picture Show, 1971
\u2022 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974
\u2022 The Whole Shootin\u2019 Match, 1978
\u2022 Tender Mercies, 1983\u00a0
\u2022 Last Night at the Alamo, 1983
\u2022 Blood Simple, 1984
\u2022 Fandango, 1985
\u2022 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, 1986
\u2022 True Stories, 1986
\u2022 Slacker, 1990
\u2022 The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom, 1993
\u2022 Lone Star, 1996
\u2022 Friday Night Lights, 2004
\u2022 No Country for Old Men, 2007
\u2022 Bernie, 2011
\u2022 Hell or High Water, 2016
\u2022 Red Rocket, 2021
\u2022 Vengeance, 2022<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in the April 2026 issue of\u00a0Texas Monthly\u00a0with the headline \u201cThe Best Picture Shows (Part Two).\u201d\u00a0Subscribe today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Video credits: Bernie: Millennium Entertainment\/Cinematic Collection\/Alamy; Fandango: Everett Collection; Hell or High Water: Prod DB\/Film 44\/Sidney Kimmel Entertainment\/Alamy; Friday Night Lights: Universal\/Courtesy Everett Collection; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2: Cannon Films\/Courtesy Everett Collection; Lone Star: Columbia\/Courtesy Everett Collection; Last Night At The Alamo: Courtesy of Watchmaker Films; The Wind: Everett Collection; Slacker: Orion Classics\/Courtesy Everett Collection; True Stories: Warner Brothers\/Courtesy Everett Collection; Vengeance: Focus Features\/Courtesy Everett Collection; The Southerner: Everett Collection<\/p>\n

When you buy a book using a link on this page, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and\u00a0Texas Monthly\u00a0receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism.<\/p>\n

Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen, I\u2019ve got no beef with John Wayne. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, Rio Bravo, True…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[87478,79100,89027,27,89028,29,35241,28],"class_list":["post-230206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-april-2026-issue","tag-film-tv","tag-filmed-in-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-film","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-movies","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}