Long before I became The Hollywood Reporter’s awards columnist, back when I was just 15, I fell in love with classic Hollywood films. Most films that “experts” said were great struck me as such, too, but one did not: The Searchers, the ninth of the 14 collaborations between John Ford and John Wayne, is set in the American West shortly after the Civil War. The film follows a group of men as they mount an epic search for the one member of a family they all loved who might have survived a Native American massacre. At the time, I found Ford’s film slow and confusing and Wayne’s character, an unrepentant and tortured Confederate veteran, repugnant, and I couldn’t understand the point of the whole enterprise or why so many others loved the film so much — so I undertook a search of my own to try to find out. From reading everything I could find about the film, watching it over and over again, studying it frame by frame and growing older and hopefully wiser myself, something remarkable happened: I came to love The Searchers. I now think it’s as beautiful, layered and powerful as any film ever made in America, and I look forward to sharing with you why.