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The Wild Bunch

1969

Sam Peckinpah

William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien ...

8.0

26,335

Western A band of brutal outlaws led by the bitter Pike Bishop (William Holden) is decimated when a railroad company ambush led by Pike's old pal Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) turns into a bloodbath. Barely escaping, the six survivors head to Mexico with Thornton's cutthroat bounty hunters in hot pursuit. They get on the good side of a Huerta warlord named Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) by taking his commission to steal U.S. Army guns in a daring ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Vincent Canby The New York Times	"[It] is very beautiful and the first truly interesting American-made Western in years (...) A fascinating movie"	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"A masterpiece (...) One of the great defining moments of modern movies (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United Kingdom	John Naughton Empire	"In the summer of 1969, while NASA was making the final preparations to put a man on the moon, Sam Peckinpah took his own small step for cinematic innovation (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	John Patterson The Guardian	"[Peckinpah] revolutionised film editing, shooting his many, violent action set-pieces with multiple cameras and viewpoints, running the cameras at different speeds (...) The results were eye-opening"	POS
United Kingdom	Nigel Floyd Time Out	"In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle, Lucien Ballard's superb cinematography complementing Peckinpah's darkly elegiac vision."	POS
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"He simply lets beauty and terror pour out of him in powerful, poetic bursts that mark him still as a film master and 'The Wild Bunch' as a bruising and brilliant work of art."	POS
United States	Whitney Williams Variety	"Film at 145 minutes is far over-length, and should be tightened extensively (...) Technically, the feature is of high quality"	NEU
United Kingdom	Tom Hutchinson Radio Times	"This is arguably one of the greatest westerns ever made (...) Peckinpah was practically reinventing a genre, with no place left for false nobility (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Tom Breihan AV Club	"It totally dismantles old ideas of Western heroism, and along the way it revolutionizes the gunfight, providing a brutal blueprint that action movies would use for decades."	POS

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