Apart from Peckinpah's simple technical control and the cut of his script, which is a knife that never slips off the bone, there is an angry quality to his mind.

| Jul 7, 2022

The film drives to its foregone conclusion with the sureness of an arrow.

| Mar 18, 2020

If you must see The Wild Bunch, be sure to take along a barf bag.

| Jan 1, 2020

Remains hugely impressive, both for its technical brilliance and the emotional ferocity of its themes: old age, friendship, betrayal and the struggle to retain some kind of cock-eyed code of honour in an increasingly cynical world.

| Dec 3, 2018

Underneath the movie, which is set on the eve of World War I, there's an elegiac plangency that stays with you long after the shocks have worn off...The Wild Bunch still won't go down easy.

| Feb 21, 2018

It's a traumatic poem of violence, with imagery as ambivalent as Goya's.

| Mar 28, 2016

Arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s -- a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.

| Apr 29, 2013

In an era when body-count films mirror the mounting body count offscreen, The Wild Bunch dissects death rather than glorifying it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 29, 2013

The Wild Bunch is an American masterpiece, one of the greatest films ever produced in the Hollywood system.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 29, 2013

It is certainly one of the best westerns ever made, and the best film of any kind to come out in 1969.

| Apr 29, 2013

It's a towering achievement that grows more riveting and resonant with the years.

| Apr 29, 2013

The Wild Bunch is Peckinpah's most complex inquiry into the metamorphosis of man into myth. Not incidentally, it is also a raucous, violent, powerful feat of American film making.

| Apr 29, 2013

Film at 145 minutes is far over-length, and should be tightened extensively, particularly in first half.

| Jun 26, 2007

The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling.

| Jun 26, 2007

In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle, Lucien Ballard's superb cinematography complementing Peckinpah's darkly elegiac vision.

| Jan 26, 2006

The Wild Bunch takes the basic elements of the Western movie myth, which once defined a simple, morally comprehensible world, and by bending them turns them into symbols of futility and aimless corruption.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 20, 2003

A true cinematic touchstone, the film has influenced a generation of movie makers, from Scorsese to Tarantino to Hong Kong action king John Woo.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000

A brilliant script, cinematography, editing, and performances complement the whole picture.

| Jan 1, 2000

Seeing this restored version is like understanding the film at last... It makes all the difference in the world.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000

The director was one of the very few filmmakers who could create a world that, however nastier or more brutish than the one we live in, never felt smaller or less complex.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000