Leone’s use of sparse, brooding silences and Ennio Morricone’s instantly recognisable score mean that the film’s soundtrack is just as effective as the striking visuals.

| Dec 29, 2023

Another packed Special Edition for a classic Sergei Leone western with shot-by-shot color grading in a wonderful 4K upgrade from Kino Lorber Studio Classics.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 27, 2022

While Eastwood is of course the star, this is arguably Van Cleef’s picture.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 4, 2022

The stage is set here for Sergio Leone’s coming masterpieces, which would transcribe this intense, unsettling energy onto a canvas large enough to fit all of its splenetic, bloodletting rage.

| May 24, 2022

Cinema greatness! And to top it off, Leone has to have some of the most interesting and strange looking people populating his film that you'd swear Fellini loaned him a band of extras.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 21, 2020

This Spaghetti Western masterpiece would only be bested by its own follow-up.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 24, 2020

Lean, mean, atmospheric and blackly comic spaghetti western by the team who all but invented the genre, well deserving of its reputation as one of the era's very best.

| Aug 13, 2012

Doesn't have the narrative strength of the first in the trilogy but individual scenes are still brilliant and each ingredient in just perfect, cast, score, tone...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2012

Leone's artful editing of close-ups to communicate the characters' spatial relationships is always a pleasure.

| Aug 13, 2012

Most fans pick The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as the stand-out, but I really like this one best.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 29, 2011

A tremendously good sequel, on top of being a tremendously good movie in and of itself - surely the best Italian Western at the time of its release.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 20, 2011

More violence and Clint-itude in Italian Western.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 15, 2010

He indulges in a certain sexually-charged imagery lifted straight from film noir

| Original Score: 84/100 | Dec 31, 2009

A hard-hitting western with upper-case values out of the busy Italo stable, this is a topnotch action entry.

| Mar 26, 2009

Looser and more relaxed as well as more elaborate than Fistful, the film is best appreciated as a series of outrageous set-pieces.

| Oct 18, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 15, 2008

The amoral film should give the less hardy pause as to its relevance or worth or endorsement for vigilante justice.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 20, 2007

Every scene crackles with energy.

| Jun 22, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 28, 2006

By introducing the character of Mortimer, Leone is able to counterpoint Eastwood's cold, amoral gunslinger with a man who has a past and a purpose.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 29, 2006