5. The Great Silence (1968)
If you're into spaghetti westerns, the name Sergio Corbucci will be largely familiar to you, given that the man directed pretty much all of the other great spaghetti westerns that Sergio Leone didn't (including the original Django, don't you know?). The best of all the Corbucci westerns is, arguably, his 1968 movie The Great Silence, though, best-known for its snowy setting and a venomous Klaus Kinski performance. The plot concerns a mute gunfighter, nicknamed "Silence," who is hired by a widow to kill the bounty hunter who murdered her boyfriend in cold blood. For much of its runtime, The Great Silence is an assured and engaging spaghetti western, made haunting by a brilliant Ennio Morricone score, though one could argue it's nothing special. And then it comes: the brutal, bleak and totally unexpected anti-ending, one which justifies this movie as a great one in a matter of minutes. As our hero prepares to face off against the bad guy, he's simply shot dead, and the people who he was trying to save? Brutally massacred. The movie ends on that note, with Kinski alive and well. As a bounty hunter, everything that he's done has been well within the "bounds of the law." It's heartbreaking, unbelievable, and undeniably great.