Metacritic reviews

The second film in Leone's Dollar trilogy finds the Italian director in better form than in A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More has better writing, superior production values, and more characters who aptly complement Eastwood's stoic Man with No Name.

While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.

A hard-hitting western with upper-case values out of the busy Italo stable, this is a topnotch action entry.

It has a wealth of marvellous Western imagery, grotesque-comic business (Van Cleef striking a match on seething baddie Klaus Kinski’s hunchback), Ennio Morricone’s baroque score, iconic stars and unforgettable supporting faces.

Leone's artful editing of close-ups to communicate the characters' spatial relationships is always a pleasure, and here he unveils his stylistic signature—extreme close-ups of the characters' eyes—as Van Cleef surveys the villain's wanted poster.

Here is a gloriously greasy, sweaty, hairy, bloody and violent Western. It is delicious.

Not as stylish as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but a significant step forward from A Fistful of Dollars, with the usual terrific compositions, Morricone score, and taciturn performances, not to mention the ubiquitous flashback disease.

The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day.