3. ‘Hard Boiled’ (1992)

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) was inducted to the hall of infamy the second the credits started to roll on this best-picturewinning Coen brothers film. Chigurh was nightmared into existence in the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel as a psychopathic hitman hired to recover a stolen satchel of drug money from a deal gone wrong. The tensest scene in a movie that’s nothing but tense scenes comes when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds the tracker in his satchel of stolen drug money in a darkened hotel room, his shotgun aimed at the door, waiting for the Chigurh’s inevitable footsteps.

7. ‘The Untouchables’ (1987)

Set in Prohibition-era Chicago during

The death of old Hollywood and newfound filmmaking freedom made the late 1960s a time of revolution and reinvention in American cinema, and Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” was one of the first films to take on the beloved, all-American genre of the Western. Gone were the black-andwhite depictions of heroism and villainy, replaced by antiheroes on the fringe, a gang of American outlaws raging against the death of the Wild West in a climactic, bloody shootout with Mexican federales.

At the height of his powers, John Woo’s action sequences have few peers, and they were never better than in “Hard Boiled,” the last of his Hong Kong films before he

Paul Newman and Robert Redford make a cozy pair as wisecracking, trainrobbing outlaws who flee to Bolivia to get the Man off their backs. They’re anti-establishment bad-guys-as-good-guys who intend to outsmart and outgun the system — or die trying. You’re left to assume the latter, when a gunfight with dozens of Bolivian soldiers ends on an iconic freeze frame. Although it’s set in the 1890s,