Unforgiven
Who says you can't go home again? Clint Eastwood held on to the Unforgiven script for 15 years until he was old enough to play the role of broken down gunfighter William Munny, who goes on one last desperate killing to earn some much needed money and recapture his past despite all of his protestations and best intentions. The result is the anti-Western, a film that captures not only the true nature of the old west but also addresses the glorified violence of past Westerns, including Eastwood's own filmography. Every character in the story is either completely destroyed by or has their life ruined by violence. Eastwood's direction and performance are superb, and Gene Hackman is brilliant as a small-town lawman whose own brutal form of justice is every bit as deplorable as the criminals he abhors so much. With Unforgiven, Eastwood has essentially closed the book on the Western genre.