Popular reviews

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 5

  Jesus, Clint, this is some dark shit

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸 ★★★★½ 13

  With High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood created arguably the most debatable and ambiguous film of his entire career - both as an actor and as a director. There is so much about this eerie western that doesn't get answered. So many details missing. So many presumptions to be made.

  Most revisionist westerns of its time were busying themselves rewriting the West as it had been told by Hollywood, mostly wrongly, for over 40 years. Eastwood decided to take the traditional mainstream western, slap it around a while and show that something could still be done with it - just as long as it was willing to change.

  It's well known by now that Eastwood's mysterious stranger rides into a town…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★★

  eastwood channels two of his biggest collaborators (leone and siegel) into one of the grimmest westerns i've seen, that plays sorta like if the wandering ronin in a kurosawa movie was actually a rapist monster as well as a brutal killer and the local pacifist townspeople who hire him to protect them from murderous outlaws turn out to be just as corrupt and contemptible as he is. we're already living in hell so might as well stop pretending.

  full discussion on ep 190 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by Adam Kempenaar ★★★★½ 3

  The Stranger: All these people, are they your sisters and brothers?

  Preacher: They most certainly are.

  The Stranger: ...Then you won't mind if they come over and stay at your place, will ya?

  And when the preacher's stunned, passive look further betrays his hypocrisy, Eastwood, not content, has the holy man graciously invite the cast-out patrons into his and the other townspeoples' homes... not charging them "one cent more than regular hotel rates."

  A relentlessly bleak allegory of the human (American?) capacity for cowardice and avarice, with Eastwood's Stranger an almost Chigurh-like supernatural presence – slightly funnier, and only slightly more righteous.

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 9

  Amoral ghost story revenge that feels like a grim pulp western paperback from HELL.

  Perhaps the cruelest American Western of that time period? Perhaps. Eastwood utilizes knowledge acquired from Siegel and Leone and conjures up a raw, sardonic, and mean little horror western yarn with ominous vibes and atmosphere that lingers in perpetual limbo equal parts hellish and haunting—a genre deconstruction where the hero is more frightening, cruel, and ugly than any of the villains. That dynamite fire n’ brimstone finale (and final shot) has been etched in my mind since I first saw it as a kid, same goes for Eastwood’s unpure hellbent on revenge specter—returning to save a town by breaking its back and making it humble. Red Dead Redemption. Might be my favorite 70’s western?

  Apparently John Wayne hated this and that makes me love it even more.

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  Review by Mike Thorn ★★★★★ 1

  This might be the cruellest and most hellish Western. The protagonist is literally and figuratively inhuman: a rapist, a harbinger of death, an emblem of vicious retribution. There's moral severity here, not only in thematic terms, but in imagistic ones too: a town painted red, Eastwood framed by towering flames as he brutally reaps what's been sown. This film is totally irreconcilable, irresponsible, even deplorable in some ways, but it has mythic, Old Testament-style heft. It took hold of me despite all reservations.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★ 6

  56/100

  Pungent little revenge tale that's unfortunately soured by a certain, how shall I put it, rapeyness. Eastwood's treatment of women in his early films always makes my skin crawl, and here we have not one but two gals who despise The Stranger until he forces himself on them, whereupon they decide that he's dreamy after all. (Though it's unclear to me whether the one he outright rapes later sleeps with him merely so that she can unlock his door for the assassins. Couldn't she just stick a knife in his heart while he sleeps?) That significant ickiness aside, though, the film has fun with its darkly comic scenario, which amounts to a one-man inversion of Seven Samurai in which…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★ 1

  The residents of Lago describe themselves as “God-fearing people.”

  They should have been worried about someone else. They just made a deal with him.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 42

  “High Plains Drifter” is a Rosetta Stone to comprehend its creator; a tablet with its script seared in fire. 

  A confluence of influences from Clint Eastwood’s acting career careen in “Drifter’s” California hellscape — where masculine bravado goes to die. 

  The plot concept for “Drifter” comes loosely from the Kitty Genovese murder; infamous for how 38 witnesses stood by and watched the victim being stabbed. Eastwood transplants the setting from Queens to the frontier, and substitutes a sheriff for the young bartender. 

  “Drifter” bares the traits of not just its own director - Clint Eastwood - but also of the men who had previously directed him. It stuffs Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western satire and Don Siegel’s hard-nosed action into what…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  Most of Eastwood's early American westerns were deliberate in their references to Italian films, so it made sense his first self-directed one would do the same, but while Post or Sturges would acknowledge his Leone roots better to incorporate the Man with No Name in a more American iconography, Eastwood seems more interested in exploring Eurowestern gothic roots for a horror/western hybrid that reimagine American western long retribution motif in a far more extreme and metaphysical vain. All of Eastwood's westerns have a certain tendency towards trying to destabilize tradition by making the violence hits harder (it must be Eastwood most New Hollywood tic), but none more than High Plains Drifter. It is his most theoretical western. a very deliberate…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 6

  "Yes, they're my neighbors, and they make me sick! Hiding behind words like faith, peace and trust!"

  Hell is a small town on the edge of civilization.

  Black-as-pitch western about a community so desperately in need of a violent savior that they give a serial rapist complete control over their town in order to kill off a few bad guys. Turns out they might have bigger problems than the bandits. By giving the man with no name free reign, they expose their own hidden violence and the hypocritical values they've buried it under. They've come together as a community, but at the cost of the lives of other human beings. The unspoken exclusion (of the bandits, of the man with…

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  Review by Tears_in_Rain ★★★★★ 16

  I still remember the first time I saw this, having stumbled across it while flipping through television channels one lazy afternoon (back in the beforetime). I remember being mesmerized by this hazy, surreal anti-western, with Eastwood's gargantuan screen presence practically towering over everything. I remember being enthralled by this bleak and darkly comic ghost story. The tale of an amoral avenging phantom, come to drag everyone down to hell.

  This ain't John Wayne's romanticized notion of the old west. In his first attempt at directing a western, Eastwood didn't come out of the gate swinging so much as he kicked the gate open and sauntered through, all bravado and swagger, before casually tossing a stick of dynamite into the heart…