Unforgiven: Critic Reviews

Enjoy it for the handsome wide-screen vistas, the interplay of the actors, the classical sweep of its story line. Just don't expect the new, soul-searching Eastwood to be any more dramatically convincing than the old.

Unforgiven is a most entertaining western that pays homage to the great tradition of movie westerns while surreptitiously expressing a certain amount of skepticism.

Jumps adroitly between the macho and anti-macho, the romantic and anti-romantic.

By now ... Eastwood has little more than a paint-by-numbers approach to acting. As a result, we relate to Munny more as a compendium of Eastwood's earlier characters.

This is the finest set of performances ever to grace a Clint Eastwood movie, and this time Eastwood even does a good job directing Eastwood. Every bullet in this movie matters.

That implacable moral balance, in which good eventually silences evil, is at the heart of the Western, and Eastwood is not shy about saying so.

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.

There's not much dramatic urgency apart from the revisionist context.

A classic Western for the ages.

This is the best work Eastwood has done as a director since The Outlaw Josey Wales 16 years ago.

One of Unforgiven's assets is the way it overturns conventions, taking the man who is typically the hero and making him the villain, while transforming the traditional bad guy into a sympathetic protagonist.

Eastwood's meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism -- on all those burdens he has been carrying with such good grace for decades.

In three decades of climbing into the saddle, Eastwood has never ridden so tall.

Unforgiven exposes the true price behind the way the West was won.

Clint Eastwood's westerns are distinctive, and that Unforgiven, as the most fully realized, is the most distinctive of all.

It's a somber feature, but one of extraordinary character development, bundled into a compelling story of men facing their sins in a most brutal, pitiless manner.

One of the absolute masterpieces of American cinema in the 1990s.

The great Orson Welles once stated that Clint Eastwood was the most underrated filmmaker in America, and the sobering footnote is that he passed away in 1985, well before Eastwood began to be taken seriously as an artist by most critics and moviegoers.

The film at its heart is the first in a line of revisionist superhero movies.

Eastwood's best film -- a compelling study of the shame and guilt that attends violence, of the rule of the mighty over the weak and of courage and cowardice.

Unforgiven began Clint Eastwood's current apology tour for his cinematic violence.

Arguably the greatest western since Sam Peckinpah hung up his stirrups.

Ironically, the ultimate Western of all was made decades after its hayday. This is captivating for all, not just fans of the genre.

A rigorous deconstruction of both fictitious violence and Eastwood's own career as a trigger-happy 'hero.'

Dark and somber in thematics and visuals, this Western is a personal work for Eastwood, in which he desconstructs his own mythic violent image, one that made him a star in the 1960s.