Unforgiven (1992), is a revisionist Western, telling the story of two men the heroic Little Bill Daggart and the villainous Will Munny. Eastwood's film is very much a deconstruction of the genre the movie starts with a prostitute getting mutilated by a cowboy only for the cowboy to get off by paying a debt to the pimp. The prostitutes then get together and put out a bounty of 1,000 dollars to any hired gun to come in and kill the cowboy.
What I love about this film, and what I like about westerns is that they are morality plays. Bill does what he believes is the right thing to do, he doesn't deserve to die for his actions. Will is the monster who drunkenly killed women and children and was basically a terrorist before he took a young beautiful wife and retired in the wilderness. The film constantly undercuts your sense of drama, you don't have these huge action set pieces it's all very claustrophobic and that plays into the finale.
This is Eastwood's best work as an actor, he's pathetic for the majority of the story until he gets back to what he needs to be successful...alcohol. Hackman plays Little Bill like John Wayne and you come to the realization that John Wayne was a pretty big jerk and he would have likely beat people to death to get information, and he would enjoy emasculating other men (the great scene with English Bob). And those English Bob scenes are fantastic as we are introduced to this colorful character who should be the lead and he's disposed off in a way that is first hilarious and then sad.
Should Unforgiven have won the Oscar...absolutely Westerns have typically come up short with the Academy and it's good that they got their due. It was certainly the best of the nominated films...but in hindsight the Academy did miss on two films I would have given the Oscar over Unforgiven, Spike Lee's Malcolm X, and Paul Verhoven's Basic Instinct. Two films that likely had a larger impact on cinema but would have been a bit more difficult to recognize at this time.