My favorite stories tend to put the heroes and the bad guys in the same room long before the final showdown. Early on in The Great Silence, Sergio Corbucci places his three most combustible characters in the same stagecoach, which will take them to the little town where the final shootout will go down. And boy, I do mean brutal: the resolution is so alien to what casual audiences are used to, Corbucci was forced to shoot an alternate ending. Any copy you can track down today will have the original ending in all its hard-hitting glory.

The hero of the film is Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who had his vocal cords cut when he witnessed his parents’ murder as a kid. Legend says they call him Silence because the silence of death is the only thing that remains in his wake. His holster is a wooden box, which can also be attached to the end of his pistol like a makeshift rifle stock. Instead of killing bad guys, he shoots their thumbs off so they can never hold a pistol again. Corbucci supposedly got the idea for a silent gunslinger from Marcello Mastroianni, who always wanted to make a western, but couldn’t speak English worth a damn.

Then there’s the sheriff who’s played by Frank Wolff, an American-born actor who made his career out of foreign films and westerns. He’s an honest, scared, and competent lawman who’s investigating the town over allegations that its bounties aren’t ethical, even though they’re technically lawful. The character immediately distrusts the latest addition to his stagecoach: a bounty hunter named Loco who cheerfully ties his victims’ corpses to the roof. It’s obvious Loco is a man who didn’t give a damn about the law until it became corrupted enough to protect him.

Here’s the thing about Loco: when you create a hero as bad ass as Silence, you’ve gotta work hard to come up with a worthy villain. So Corbucci cast none other than the legendarily mad Klaus Kinski. When Loco kills the husband of Pauline (the beautiful Vonetta McGee of Blackula fame), she sells her house to the banker who’s responsible for creating the corrupt bounties. She plans to use the money to hire Silence so that he can set things right. Silence, who’s fallen in love with Pauline, tries and fails to goad Loco into a shootout. The problem is, Loco is as clever as he is sneaky. He refuses to partake in a shootout until the conditions favor him.

It’s a slow burn to the explosive ending, which makes it clear the filmmakers are unwilling to dilute their message for commercial viability. This is probably the reason the film never saw a proper release in the United States until a few years after DVD players came along. What I just watched was one of those earlier DVDs and it only makes me wish more for a proper Blu-Ray release.

Ultimately, I’ve enjoyed other Corbucci films a little more for keeping true to the entertainment-over-art style of spaghetti westerns, but few have been as masterful—or risky—as this one. It’s a great movie because it’s harder to digest than simple westerns. Love it or hate it, you won’t be unaffected.

I’ve always wondered why we’re drawn to stories in which a relatable hero is put through absolute hell. I assume the first stories ever told were about rival tribes, untrustworthy people, and dangerous predators—the very things The Revenant is about.

What makes it more compelling than most movies is Leonardo DiCaprio’s willingness to get the shot. He actually plunges into ice cold water and crawls through real snow naked. There is so little cheating here and director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won the Oscar for Best Director last year, wants us to know it’s all real, too; he doesn’t bother using a different take when his actor’s breath—or blood—gets on the camera lens. I’d say DiCaprio will probably win Best Actor if I didn’t think the Oscars has some illogical vendetta against him.

In the early 1800s, Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) and his “half-breed” son are trackers in a fur trapping outfit. Fellow trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) is the kind of blowhard who has a problem with everyone, especially Glass. Fitzgerald is, without a doubt, the biggest movie asshole of the year. You don’t love to hate him like a lot movie villains, you just hate him, period, in the way you hated Nurse Ratched and Dolores Umbridge. After Glass is gruesomely mauled by a bear, what Fitzgerald thinks best is suffocating him so that he can no longer slow the others down.

The Revenant is a beautifully nasty movie, shot on lenses so wide the vast landscapes curl around the edges. There’s at least one ham-fisted visual metaphor, which you wouldn’t expect from a director of this caliber, but overall I enjoyed it, if only because Iñárritu forces himself to step out of his comfort zone yet again. But other than its lead performances, the only thing The Revenant really has going for it is its admittedly breathtaking technical accomplishments. I don’t think it will win Best Picture, if only because Iñárritu’s last film did, and it’s not my first (or even second) favorite western of the year.

While I still think Pulp Fiction is probably my generation’s most influential film, Quentin Tarantino’s most entertaining film for me is Inglourious Basterds. That opening scene, between Hanz Landa and the poor dairy farmer, is one of the tensest, funniest, scariest, and most beautifully patient things ever burned to celluloid. With The Hateful Eight, Tarantino attempts to sustain that note for nearly two hours in the snow-covered scenery of Wyoming.

The film opens on Major Marquis Warren, a bounty hunter played by Samuel L. Jackson. He’s sitting on a saddle which is mounted to a pile of dead bounties. The cold weather has killed his horse and the pile of frozen corpses amount to a few thousand dollars—if he can get them back to town. A stagecoach comes his way and he finagles a ride with the man in the back: John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), who’s handcuffed himself to Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a vile woman wanted for murder. She doesn’t seem to mind much when Ruth beats the shit out of her, which is often. Hell, she may even like it.

Along the way they pick up another suspicious traveler, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims he’s the new sheriff. Ruth—who starts out paranoid and becomes increasingly so by the minute—reluctantly agrees to take the man into the stagecoach. Unable to beat a blizzard, they hole up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a cozy outpost with a stocked bar and a chess game by the fireplace. Ruth begins to suspect that at least one of the eight people in the haberdashery is planning to free his prisoner. When they ask Domergue herself, she says, “You’re right! Me and one of them fellas is in cahoots! We’re just waiting for everybody to go to sleep… that’s when we’re going to kill y’all!” The way she says it is both hilarious and chilling and manages to tell her captors nothing more about their predicament.

There’s a reason Tarantino uses Kurt Russell and music which was originally produced for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Surprisingly, that film has more influence on The Hateful Eight than the spaghetti westerns that so heavily inspired Django Unchained. Imagine The Thing, without the alien, and a western setting. That’s The Hateful Eight.

Russell plays the kind of confident dork he was in Death Proof, but it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh who steals the show with her over-the-top villainy, hilarious in the way she only gets meaner the more she’s used like a punching bag. I don’t think Samuel Jackson is quite as good as he was in Unchained, but that was a role of a lifetime; in this one he gets the most substantial monologue of the entire movie. The rest of the cast, including Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen, are perfectly suspicious. With any luck, Tarantino will do at least one more western before his career is over, but topping his first two will take more than skill.

The Hateful Eight is long, slow, and gratuitously violent. My kind of movie.

In 1973, the year before Blazing Saddles released, the spaghetti western was dead. Sergio Leone had already made what many consider to be the greatest western of all time. His assistant director on the first two Dollar films, Tonino Valerii, went on to direct Day of Anger with Lee Van Cleef. So it was surprising that Leone arranged to have Valerii direct My Name Is Nobody, a send-up of the subgenre they had defined.

Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) is a bit of a legend in the gunslingin’ world, which means he frequently has to dispatch the men who’ve come to kill him for rep. In the aftermath of his latest shootout, a bystander asks, “Is there anyone faster?” The reply: “Nobody.” Enter Nobody, a childlike wanderer played by Terence Hill.

Three bad guys attempt to dupe Nobody into delivering a booby trapped picnic basket to Jack. Nobody agrees. When Jack asks what’s in the basket, Nobody says, “Oh, this? I reckon it’s a bomb.” To which Jack replies, “I reckon you’re right.” Nobody tosses the basket back to the bad guys and yells, “He didn’t want it!” as the basket explodes.

Meanwhile, a group of bandits known as the Wild Bunch (an intentional reference to Sam Peckinpah, whose name also appears on a grave marker) are laundering stolen gold by passing it off as the production of a dummy mining operation. Although Jack assumes Nobody is just another gunslinger who’s come to kill him for a shot at fame, Nobody reveals that he idolizes the gunslinger; he actually wants Jack to take on the gang single-handedly so that his name can go down in history books. Jack just wants to quietly retire to Europe.

Like Two Mules for Sister Sara, My Name is Nobody is not what I’d call a classic, but it’s more memorable than most movies. Then again, maybe it’s only memorable because we’ve seen some of these scenes a hundred times before, only this time Leone and Valerii have turned them into gags. Also in on the joke: Ennio Morricone, whose score plays like a parody of his own works. You get the feeling these guys weren’t mourning the death of the spaghetti western, but merrily digging its grave.