Critics reviews

It has a distinct genre intelligence that is familiar to all of Eastwood's finest movies, which can feel like the work of a studied rhetorician who builds our expectations and assumptions before systematically breaking them down. Eastwood uses the classical Western's own formal strategies against it. He'll give you the familiar lead-in to a shootout — hopping back and forth from holster to holster, gaze to gaze — only to have one man chicken out.

These flashes of fuckuppery contribute to the movie's cautionary resonance: Unforgiven is a stark western in slow motion, obsessed with reflection, not action... It's this kind of emotional and situational complexity — ninety minutes of narrative tension leading up to a shouted conversation about water as a body bleeds out — that continues to distinguish Unforgiven.

As a filmmaker and personality, Clint Eastwood has been one of Hollywood's most problematic creators but most people would agree that this 1992 Oscar winner, a movie he waited years to make (wanting to be the same age as its hired-killer protagonist), gave him his strongest role. Also his greatest movie—and maybe even the last truly great western that anyone will make.

The movie's portrait of white male entitlement that's questioned yet rewarded remains rich and haunting, especially as rendered by cinematographer Jack N. Green with a bare and melancholic sense of wide-open space that spins self-pity into a visual song of transcendentalism. The film's hypocrisy only deepens its nightmarish resonance, as Eastwood's empathy, tenderness, and self-absorption are inseparable and irreconcilable.

...Revisiting [Unforgiven], which would seem to be his last encounter with the genre, only to validates the idea of the contradictory systems in his art, the way he can get away with guilelessly "making a statement" while so thoroughly grounding the events in his films in the specific and circumstantial. This effectively deflates any perceived grandstanding, and syncs the narrative to whatever emotional states he wishes.

Refuting conventional cowboy heroics, Eastwood presents an alternative myth whereby a man, goaded by Furies to yield to a past that still haunts him, despatches himself to a living Hell. In this dark, timeless terrain, the film achieves a magnificent intensity.

As a moral reconsideration of the role of violence in previous Eastwood films, this is strong and sure, and characters who play against genre expectations give the film a provocative, smoldering aftertaste. The only limitation, really, is that the picture hasn't much dramatic urgency apart from its revisionist context.

With every shot, Unforgiven pounds home the lesson that death is not abstract, that the person you gun down has the same subjectivity as you. The film is just enough of a shoot-'em-up to make it a meditation on the practice, not just the theory, of violence.

With ``Unforgiven,`` Clint Eastwood has created an adult Western that can stand with the great accomplishments of the genre`s golden age-John Ford`s ``The Searchers,`` Howard Hawks` ``Rio Bravo,`` Anthony Mann`s ``Bend of the River,`` Budd Boetticher`s ``The Tall T.`` This dark, melancholic film is a reminder-never more necessary than now-of what the American cinema is capable of, in the way of expressing a mature, morally complex and challenging view of the world.

Unforgiven is about a man who cannot escape his past. Eastwood has. Who would have thought that the cheroot-smoking, poncho-wearing star of all those surreal spaghetti westerns would turn into one of Hollywood's most daring filmmakers?