For a lesson in how to resuscitate a dying genre, you could do worse than Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone’s masterpiece from 1968.
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07/24/09
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)
98
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:47
Fresh:46
Rotten:1
Average Rating:9/10
Consensus: A landmark Sergio Leone spaghetti western masterpiece featuring a classic Morricone score.
Runtime: 2 hrs 45 mins
Genre: Westerns
Synopsis: Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), the power-hungry owner of a railroad company, hires Frank (Henry Fonda, playing against type), a gunfighter without a conscience, to kill anyone who stands in the way of... [More]
Starring: Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson
Director: Sergio Leone
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Reviews for Once Upon a Time in the West
There are plenty of unforgettable moments, such as that sublime crane shot over the new settlement of Flagstone, accompanied by Ennio Morricone's achingly romantic music.
07/24/09
Quite simply a masterpiece, Leone's revisionist western is a mythic spectacle of a film and a landmark in cinema history.
07/24/09
The Western is dead - or so they tell us. Long live Leone's timeless monument to the death of the West itself, rivalled only by Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for the title of best ever made.
01/26/06
One of the greatest ventures into the myth and legend of the Wild West.
07/24/09
Once Upon a Time in the West is often mesmerizing cinema.
01/01/00
Sergio Leone’s masterpiece.
07/28/09
Leone (1921-1989) is here at the peak of his epic powers.
09/29/05
Top CriticSergio Leone's frontier parable is a landmark in Westerns, and features not only one of the greatest opening sequences ever made, but also the best use of a harmonica in cinema.
07/24/09
Though elegiac, Once Upon a Time in the West is too vital to be a flat-out elegy, too influential to be a lament. It very simply matters.
11/10/03
When West is jumping, it's impossible to turn away.
11/16/03
If only the first 10 minutes of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West still existed, this most hyperbolic of oat operas would still be acknowledged as one of the genre's greatest exhumations.
09/27/05
What fun.
11/20/07
‘Once Upon a Time…’ now looks like an over-cooked mess of style, metaphor and reference.
07/24/09
Sergio Leone’s 1969 masterwork, in which he pulls together most of the themes of his three Dollar films, and also contributes one of the most famous credit sequences in history, will wet your lips all over again.
07/24/09
'even the quieter romantic or reflective moments are filled with a sense of energy coming from the expectation that at any given moment something huge is going to happen.'
05/11/04
One of the greatest face movies ever made.
12/10/03
Top CriticClick to read the article
10/31/02
These days, cartoonish, genre-pastiching movies are everywhere, but Leone’s films in this vein are still more enjoyable than most.
07/28/09
No review available.
06/15/05
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