…a revisionist Western, and a rare genre entry with loaded satirical intent that’s always hiding in plain sight…captures a master director in absolute full flow…

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 28, 2024

Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack is widely regarded as the best of his career, with the moody, two-note flute melody... an instantly recognisable refrain that is folksy and avant-garde at the same time.

| Apr 22, 2024

It makes a case for Sergio Leone as a true artist and it slowly reveals itself to have real emotional heft when you begin considering some of the ambitious themes that Leone tackles.

| Feb 2, 2023

While it may not be the best Western ever made - heck, it's not even the best Western Leone ever made - it's clearly the work of a master filmmaker whose style has never grown stale.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 30, 2021

If you only see one spaghetti Western in your lifetime, this is the one to see.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 27, 2021

The score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is magnificent. The main theme that plays over the titles is simultaneously of a specific time and also timeless.

| Mar 24, 2021

Leone's penchant for contrasting two kinds of shots, close-ups and long shots, finds its corollary in the gray or blue...Leone turns gray soldiers blue in the simplest way possible. Movies were invented for ideas like that.

| Jan 26, 2021

Boasts what is often considered the greatest showdown ever filmed.

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

The quintessential spaghetti western.

| Aug 4, 2020

As in an opera, the characters are archetypes, not figures we particularly identify with; as in an opera, we waited a long time for the inevitable ghastly conclusion; as in an opera, Leone seeks (and delivers) a kind of ecstatic dread.

| Jul 23, 2020

The final scene in the Sad Hill Cemetery is a riveting spectacle, made so by some brilliantly tight editing and underscored by the genius of Ennio Morricone's genre-defining composition.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 6, 2020

When Ennio Morricone's score kicks in and Leone's editing picks up, our everyday problems fade away like a cowboy riding off into the sunset.

| Apr 5, 2020

If you've never gotten into spaghetti Westerns, there's no time like the present to give it a go with one of the best.

| Apr 4, 2020

But "GBU" remains the iconic piece for all time.

| Nov 10, 2017

There are two kinds of people, my friend. Those who love Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and those who resist the machismo and gallows humor of what is arguably the definitive spaghetti western.

| Jun 16, 2016

Leone's liberal use of widescreen shots in conjunction with extreme close-ups gives the movie an epic quality that is matched in scope by a skeletal narrative structure that breathes with a poker-faced mood, tone, and personality.

| Original Score: A+ | Feb 10, 2013

A unique vision of the American West as place of desolation and ruin on a truly epic scale.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 27, 2011

The defining spaghetti western pits a charismatic Clint Eastwood against partner and nemesis Eli Wallach and perpetual enemy Lee Van Cleef.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 15, 2011

Potent Italian-Western shoot-'em up/war drama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 15, 2010

Its parody of genre conventions resonates with scope and power.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 22, 2010