“Sixties Western Epics” series

This is a six-shooter of great Westerns encompassing the sweep of the genre in all its forms, from the highly traditional to the highly revisionist. Let’s round them all up: The Magnificent Seven, a remake of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, is breezier and less insightful but tremendously entertaining. Yul Brynner shines as the white-knight gunslinger, and Eli Wallach is suitably nasty as his bandit enemy. Wallach got a far more nuanced role as Tuco in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, butting heads with squinty Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef over a coffinful of gold coins. The most obscure of the series is Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 Ride the High Country , which, like his later The Wild Bunch, meditates on men of action at the close of their careers—in this case, longtime oater actors Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a treat for William Goldman’s clever script and nifty performances by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, but you may want to head out for some popcorn during the cloying “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” musical interlude. Cat Ballou presents the bizarre spectacle of leathery Lee Marvin playing for laughs, in a dual role as the silver-nosed villain and the good-hearted drunk Kid Shelleen. Dustin Hoffman goes Marvin one better in Little Big Man, Arthur Penn’s satiric look at the Old West from the Indian point of view. Hoffman’s hapless schlub Jack Crabb bounces around from missionaries to Indians to Custer’s cavalry, immersing himself in every new environment without ever really knowing what the hell is going on. Tragic, biting and often very funny, this one’s the best of a good bunch. Oak Street Cinema, (612) 331-3134, oakstreetcinema.org