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

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.

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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.

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One of the most compelling validations of the western genre's most elemental touchstones.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

| Original Score: 3/5

Art it is, summoned out of the imagination of Leone and painted on the wide screen so vividly that we forget what marginal productions these films were.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

| Original Score: 5/5

Both epic and intimate: The sun-baked panoramas of the West (actually Spain) and the gigantic battles of North against South have a counterpoint in the dramas that play out between the three men.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

Pure spaghetti western perfection.

| Original Score: 5/5

Sergio Leone's grandiose 1966 western epic is nothing less than a masterclass in movie storytelling, a dynamic testament to the sheer, invigorating uniqueness of cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/6

This is a great movie, whatever strange estuary of the western river it occupies.

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

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

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10

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

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10

| Original Score: 4/5

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+

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

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

[Leone] weighs every movement carefully; every footstep, every squeeze of the trigger, screams epic. Everything is important and nothing is insignificant.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

It demonstrates that a film can be exciting and funny and epic in scope while still retaining the peculiar vision of an artiste compelled to capture his obsessions with a Techniscope lens.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

| Original Score: 4/5

| Original Score: 4/5