The Wild Bunch

Director: Sam Peckinpah

1968 / 135min / 35mm

An elegy for the classic Hollywood Western written in bright red blood, Peckinpah’s rueful tale of saddlesore aging outlaws on the run from an all-too-civilized West brought together one of the finest ensemble casts ever assembled—the gallery of life-marred faces includes William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, and Ernest Borgnine—and single-handedly changed action choreography for all time, taking cross-cutting techniques introduced in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to delirious new extremes. “Arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s… Galvanizes the cliches of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.”—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice