Popular reviews

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 9

  100

  4K UHD

  A lament for the bad men, and the good they thought they did.

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  Review by Two Cineasts ★★★★★ 13

  "I swore I would never be involved in a picture with this much violence in it. But the more I read it and the more I came to understand the purpose of the film, the more fascinated I became."
  (Gene Hackman)

  
  BLURRING THE LINES BETWEEN HEROISM AND VILLAINY, "UNFORGIVEN" SHATTERS THE MYTH OF "THE OLD WEST"

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 2

  In the Antigone section of Barton Byg's book on Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Byg cites a 1992 Cahiers du Cinema cover feature which discussed Unforgiven and Antigone together. In Byg's text, he writes, "Both Antigone and Unforgiven present a frontier where the laws of civilization have lost their credibility." While there is a cogent comparison to be made between the two films in their specific modes of deconstruction, what Byg is saying here is only partially true - because he is really describing Antigone only and not Unforgiven. With the Eastwood film, it would make more sense to write, "Unforgiven presents a frontier where the laws of a genre has lost its credibility."

  Unforgiven is Eastwood's most chilling film,…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 10

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  I've killed women and children. I've killed everything that walks or crawls at one time or another. And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you done to Ned.

  Atonement. 

  A study of regret and contemplation. The final western from the man who helped redefined the genre sees him in deconstruction mode and pulverizing it for a modern audience. Trademark scenes drenched in darkness and emotions conveyed via actions. From the moment Will hits the bottle again till the end is some of the most impeccable, timeless storytelling that I’ve ever seen.

  Monolithic.

  One of my all timers.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

  A film about how the "West" as a concept was largely a series of intersecting male insecurities, from penis anxiety to the overwhelming fear of losing a fight. The hero is a man with a past of ruinous, pointless violence who bettered himself only when he separated himself from his old pack and settled down with a woman who showed him another kind of life, and his aged wisdom of the evil of his old ways constantly nags at him when he sinks into old habits. Honestly, more revolutionary a revisionist western than I think an actual liberal could produce today, or at least certainly one less interested in blaring these themes as opposed to teasing them out with subtle elegance.

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 7

  "I can assure you, if you did, that the sight of royalty would cause you to dismiss all thoughts of bloodshed and you would stand... how shall I put it? In awe. Now, a president... well I mean...why not shoot a president?"

  The last Western. Hackman. Eastwood. Freeman. Harris. The coolest part of this movie is when Clint leaves his two kids, ages 9 (?) and 5 (?), alone on their homestead for several weeks to tend pigs while he goes out to kill people.

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  Review by Sam Van Hallgren ★★★★★ 5

  As a movie about America, rivals THE GODFATHER as maybe the best ever. Also like the Godfather, it's just damn fun to watch.

  America is far too complex a place for any one story to explain it; but the one UNFORGIVEN tells is a revealing one. William Munny - our hero - is a reformed killer. A killer of women and children whose memory is peopled by the ghosts of his undeserving victims. When we meet up with him, he's a widower and a failing pig farmer with two kids to care for. When he's persuaded to dust off his gun, he tells himself it's because the folks he'll hunt down "have it coming" - an act of honorable revenge…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★ 3

  Clint Eastwood started to direct around the time that the western went from being an action genre to be Hollywood auteurs favorite art genre hangout and to some point all his four straightforward westerns are very labored and self-conscious exercises in the same, but he was never that interested in most of the standbys that attracted others, all the genre discussion itself and "America" (outside of Josey Weles) as much as he saw the trappings as ideal to deliver his avenging ghost persona. a man of violence who exist to put the desire of action into place, who is there just to put Old Testament morality into movement (all of Eastwood's western ghosts are righteous, but monsters all the same).…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 4

  The Duke of Death, or “Is that what it was like in the old days?”

  An older, wearier Clint goes back to the ghostly, self-critical Leone/Seigel cowboy-as-horror-monster vibe of High Plains Drifter and made one of the hardest, saddest films ever about being a guy who deals in torturous mortal wounds and gruesome, vengeful executions/massacres with the same familiar, matter-of-fact naturalism it takes for someone else to ride a bike or pick up the bottle again. ("It's a hell of a thing.") Every time I revisit this I’m blown away by how it casually undercuts almost every conventional moment or avenue a movie like this might make towards treating its genre storytelling with nostalgia and excitement and instead locates the…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 42

  “Unforgiven” sees a weary God cleansing the cinema of his own creation. It’s the Great Flood of the Western genre. 

  Only here - God is, himself, caught up in the fatal waters. 

  Just as Sam Peckinpah had once cast himself as a grizzled old coffin-maker in one of his later works, so Clint Eastwood plays the weary engine of his own orchestrated destruction in “Unforgiven.” 

  Eastwood - early in his career - never a loser, always a loner - is undone by both tendencies in what was (until “Cry Macho”) his last Western. The film sees him as a sick and solitary widower who musters up some last fight to claim a bounty on men who cut up the face…

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★½

  This is commonly referred to as an "anti-western western." This is because no one says "Yee-haw"

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  Review by CinemaCl🎃wn ★★★½ 10

  Defying the entire mythology of the Old Wild West, Unforgiven is unlike any western before or after it for this tale completely strips bare the very culture & legacy that has built itself around the west and, in simple words, marks the end of a bygone era in cinema. And who better than Clint Eastwood to hammer down the final nail on this spent genre's coffin.

  Unforgiven tells the story of William Munny; a once merciless assassin in the glorifying days of the Wild West who now has retired to a peaceful life with his children. But when a young bloke shows up with an offer to join him for a bounty of $1000, Munny ties up his laces for one…