Ride the High Country was a sensitive, modest film, but Peckinpah has aimed much higher this time. The Wild Bunch is not a minor film; it's a sprawling, spectacular, ambitious, wilfully controversial picture, an assault on [an] audience's senses and emotions, an aggressive bid for the spotlight. Fortunately, the film deserves the spotlight. Its first impression is literally over-powering; The Wild Bunch is much more dazzling than Ride the High Country, but it loses some of the reflective qualities that made Peckinpah's early film so quietly memorable. There were stark images of violence in Ride the High Country too, but violence is the subject and the controlling passing of The Wild Bunch. Let me say right away that the violence does not offend me, even though this is the goriest film I have ever seen. But the gore is not gratuitous; the film is intelligent about the significance...