Critics reviews

The wildly stylized cinematography—including some of the most dramatic close-ups in movie history during the climactic standoff—jagged editing patterns, and eerie, all-time great score by Ennio Morricone show Leone at the peak of his powers: harsh, potent, and completely unpretentious, this is genre cinema elevated to the level of enduring art.

Ennio Morricone's score reached a peak of orchestral ecstasy that is a long way from the lean, ambient soundscape he created for the first film. By then, Leone's visual approach, so bare-bones in Fistful, had flowered into something almost operatic; watching in sequence, one gets the sense that he felt he had to burn the western to the ground first in order to build something new and spectacular two movies later.

[Leone] made outrageously entertaining movies that reflected a punch-drunk love for American genre fare, the conventions of which he inflated to a near-operatic scale after refracting them through his own unique cultural sensibility. And THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY remains the high point of both Leone's career and the spaghetti western in general.

It is rare that a film is located precisely at the crossroad between a classical art whose secret will soon be lost and baroque proposals whose recipes will be a huge hit. It is rare that a director is honest (or schizoid?) enough to simply juxtapose, without any possible reconciliation, what is no longer quite compatible. It is even rarer that instead of suffering from this split, his talent thrives on it... Leone is both ahead of everyone and late behind everyone, he is therefore on time.