10: The Wild Bunch (1969) - directed by Sam Peckinpah

I consider Peckinpah's ultraviolent deconstruction of the Western (especially the outlaw films which tended to glorify the very criminals they're based on) as one of the best films of all-time and makes my top ten at number 10. This film was Peckinpah at his best and most controversial. While exploitation cinema such as horror have already been coming out with graphic violence and very mature themes the mainstream genres of the time (westerns, comedies and romantic dramas) were still quite puritanical in how it portrayed sex and violence on-screen. Even the best of that era reined in their filmmakers from showing and giving away too much.

Peckinpah would have none of that and his force of personality bulldozed any attempt to water down his vision of the lawlessness and utter chaos that was the Old West at the turn of the century. He didn't see them as glamorous and heroic. What he saw were deeply flawed men who lived day-to-day as if it was their last and in some cases this happened to be the truth. These were men he thought were a construct of the time and whose very nature as mavericks in a world starting to conform to uniformity were becoming an anachronism. I'd even say that anyone who wanted to know what sort of a man Sam Peckinpah was should watch and study The Wild Bunch. This film could almost be an unofficial autobiography of Peckinpah not just as a filmmaker but as a man.

The ultraviolence and his treatment of language and sex in this film would influence the next generation of filmmakers such as Scorsese, Coppola, Lumet (though a contemporary of his), Bertolucci and then the generation after that one in Tarantino, Woo, Haneke, Fincher and Park.

Even before Eastwood's own revisionist tale in how we perceived the Old West in Unforgiven this film by Peckinpah beat him by several decades and when put up against each other still remains the more powerful and poignant of the two.