The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo.) Reviews

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.

Full Review | Original Score: A+

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

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10

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

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

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

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Its parody of genre conventions resonates with scope and power.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

Sergio Leone's dramatic directing style is powerful and well delivered, even by today's standards.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

The fellas in Leone's films are seething cesspools of hatred and frustration whose only satisfaction-however fleeting-is found in pursuit and acquisition of money

Full Review | Original Score: 89/100

The sublime film music, now-iconic situations (like the climactic ghost town shootout), and sure visual style add up to a pitch-perfect genre pic that ongoingly influences generations of hip filmmakers. [Blu-ray]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

All three arrive at the cache at the same time. Who gets it? Director Leone doesn't seem to care very much, and after 161 minutes of mayhem, audiences aren't likely to either.

Full Review

Leone created a phenomenal film but also created some of the most memorable shots in film history. The extreme close-ups are still impressive to this day.

| Original Score: 5/5

It still looks a treat and a bold and largely successful attempt to recast the traditions of the genre in a new, sometimes critical, almost operatic way.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

The visuals are eye-popping, the score (by Ennio Morricone) magnificent, the Civil War set-pieces both stunning and haunting. If you're going to end a trilogy, this is the way to do it.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

The new length gives a clearer view of the civil war context: a nightmare of panic as the south flees before the Union's advance.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Re-released movies are forever claiming to be iconic, but few can hold the title as easily as Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Sergio Leone's masterpiece is as enduring as the scorched desert in which it is filmed. Also receives props for most effective use of whistling ever.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Amid the endless homages and the sheer adoration meted out to Sergio Leone's ambitious, pricier finale to his Spaghetti Western trilogy, it's easy to forget just how damn good the film is.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

The third in the Clint Eastwood series of Italo westerns, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is exactly that -- a curious amalgam of the visually striking, the dramatically feeble and the offensively sadistic.

Full Review

Leone also endows the film with a clever visual style. His sense of scale is especially inspired.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10

Though ordained from the beginning, the three-way showdown that climaxes the film is tense and thoroughly astonishing.

Full Review

The definitive spaghetti western.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4