(Clint Eastwood, US 1992, 131 min.)

20th Anniversary! After 20 years toiling behind the camera, Eastwood the director finally achieved the stature of Clint the actor with Unforgiven, a violent, dust-choked Western that revitalized a genre everyone took for dead. Unforgiven begins with a set-up we think we’ve seen before: retired gunslinger Will Munny (Eastwood) leaves his hog farm for one last job, avenging a prostitute badly disfigured by a john whom the sheriff (Gene Hackman) has no interest in punishing. But as this tense and atmospheric action film winds to its conclusion, Eastwood and screenwriter David Webb Peoples affirm the Western as a complex vehicle for untangling the legacies of vigilantism, sexism, racism, and institutional rot. Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

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