1. ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)

made his name in Hollywood. Chow YunFat is an officer with a dead partner and a score to settle, and Tony Leung is an undercover cop embedded in the mob responsible. But the plot is secondary to the action: There are more shots fired than words exchanged, and the body count spares no one. From the opening salvo in a tea house to the elaborate piece de resistance in a hospital (where even babies are in peril), the relentless “Hard Boiled” barely pauses to take a breath. And when it does, it’s just to reload.

2. ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (1969)

George Roy Hill’s revisionist Western says more about the era in which it was made than it does about the era it depicts.

This is who a lot of people think of when they think of Clint Eastwood: a nameless loner gunslinger in a sideswept poncho with a cigarillo clenched between his gritted teeth, filmed in impeccably composed widescreen cinematography to the twangy strains of Ennio Morricone’s famous score. The third and best film in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy has been so influential on modern filmmaking and pop-art connoisseurs like Quentin Tarantino, it’s almost impossible to see past all that immortal iconography. Most influential of all is the finale’s often-imitated but unmatched deadlock.