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Best Small town Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of small town cinema — measured across 6,745 indexed frames from 92 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Small town films over-index on cowboy hat, mountain and plaid shirt — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Fire In The Sky (1993)

    Rob LiebermanDP Bill PopeIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    On the evening of November 5, 1975, a group of loggers saw a bright crimson light in a forest in White Mountains, Arizona. Curious, Travis Walton goes out for a closer look and is pushed to the ground by a blue-green energy beam. His co-workers escape in terror and they inform the police that Travis has been abducted by a flying saucer. For the next five days, Travis remains missing and the loggers endure ridicule and contempt as they are accused of murder. When he is found alive, Travis is unable to account the missing days, but the amazing ordeal slowly begins to emerge.

  2. 2

    The Killer Inside Me (2010)

    Michael WinterbottomDP Marcel ZyskindIMDb 6.1TMDB 5.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Sadism and masochism beneath a veneer of revenge. Lou Ford is a mild-mannered sheriff's deputy in a Texas oil town in the mid 1950's. His boss sends him to roust a prostitute living in a rural house. She slaps him; he hits her, then, after daily sex for the next few weeks, he decides it's love. She's devoted to him and becomes his pawn in a revenge plot she thinks is to shakedown the son of Chester Conway, the town's wealthy king of construction. Lou has a different plan, and bodies pile up as murder leads to murder. The district attorney suspects Lou, and Conway may have an inkling, but Lou stays cool. Is love, or at least peace, in the cards?

  3. 3

    Tremors (1990)

    Ron UnderwoodDP Alexander GruszynskiIMDb 7.2TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    A small town gradually becomes aware of a strange creature which picks off people one by one. But what is this creature, and where is it? At the same time, a seismologist is working in the area, she detects _tremors_. The creature lives underground, and can 'pop up' without warning. Trapped in their town, the town-folk have no escape.

  4. 4

    The Last Stand (2013)

    Kim Jee-woonDP Kim Ji-yongIMDb 6.3TMDB 6.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Sheriff Owens is a man who has resigned himself to a life of fighting what little crime takes place in sleepy border town Sommerton Junction after leaving his LAPD post following a bungled operation that left him wracked with failure and defeat after his partner was crippled. After a spectacular escape from an FBI prisoner convoy, the most notorious, wanted drug kingpin in the hemisphere is hurtling toward the border at 200 mph in a specially outfitted car with a hostage and a fierce army of gang members. He is headed, it turns out, straight for Summerton Junction, where the whole of U.S. law enforcement will have their last opportunity to make a stand and intercept him before he slips across the border forever. At first reluctant to become involved, and then counted out because of the perceived ineptitude of his small town force, Owens ultimately accepts responsibility for the face off.

  5. 5

    Near Dark (1987)

    Kathryn BigelowDP Adam GreenbergIMDb 6.9TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    A mid-western farm boy reluctantly becomes a member of the undead when a girl he meets turns out to be part of a band of southern vampires who roam the highways in stolen cars. Part of his initiation includes a bloody assault on a hick bar.

  6. 6

    Rio Bravo (1959)

    Howard HawksDP Russell HarlanIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Sheriff John T. Chance has his hands full after arresting Joe Burdette for murder. He knows that Burdette's brother Nathan, a powerful rancher, will go to any lengths to get him out of jail. Chance's good friend Pat Wheeler offers to help but within 20 minutes of making the offer is gunned down in the street, shot in the back. That leaves his elderly deputy Stumpy, the town drunk Dude - once a deputy and a pretty good shot when he was sober - and a young hand, Colorado, who used to work for Wheeler. Nathan Burdette meanwhile has a couple of dozen men at his disposal. Chance does his best to prepare all the while romancing a pretty gambler who goes by the name of Feathers.

  7. 7

    Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

    Sergio LeoneDP Tonino Delli ColliIMDb 8.5TMDB 8.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Story of a young woman, Mrs. McBain, who moves from New Orleans to frontier Utah, on the very edge of the American West. She arrives to find her new husband and family slaughtered, but by whom? The prime suspect, coffee-lover Cheyenne, befriends her and offers to go after the real killer, assassin gang leader Frank, in her honor. He is accompanied by Harmonica, a man already on a quest to get even.

  8. 8

    Gremlins (1984)

    Joe DanteDP John HoraIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Minature green monsters tear through the small town of Kingston Falls. Hijinks ensue as a mild-mannered bank teller releases these hideous loonies after gaining a new pet and violating two of three simple rules: No water (violated), no food after midnight (violated), and no bright light. Hilarious mayhem and destruction in a town straight out of Norman Rockwell. So, when your washing machine blows up or your TV goes on the fritz, before you call the repair man, turn on all the lights and look under all the beds. 'Cause you never can tell, there just might be a gremlin in your house.

  9. 9

    U-Turn (1997)

    Oliver StoneDP Robert RichardsonIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    When Bobby's car breaks down in the desert while on the run from some of the bookies who have already taken two of his fingers, he becomes trapped in the nearby small town where the people are stranger than anyone he's encountered. After becoming involved with a (unbeknownst to him) young married woman, her husband hires Bobby to kill her. Later, she hires Bobby to kill the husband.

  10. 10

    Out of the Past (1947)

    Jacques TourneurDP Nicholas MusuracaIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Jeff Bailey, small-town gas pumper, has his mysterious past catch up with him one day when he's ordered to meet with gambler Whit Sterling. En route to the meeting, he tells girlfriend Ann his story. Flashback: Once, Jeff was a private eye hired by Sterling to find his mistress Kathie who shot Whit and absconded with $40,000. He traces her to Acapulco, where the delectable Kathie makes Jeff forget all about Sterling. Back in the present, Whit's new job for Jeff is clearly a trap, but Jeff's precautions only leave him more tightly enmeshed.

What small town films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a small town frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — cowboy hat is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • cowboy hat4.4×
  • mountain2.1×
  • plaid shirt1.8×
  • steering wheel1.7×
  • snow1.6×
  • boy1.6×
  • fedora1.5×

How small town films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate small town from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 86%eye levelvs 69% baseline

What breaks the pattern

The Vast of Night (2019) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 6,745 frames from 92 films carrying the small town label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/small-town

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