Unlike most directors of westerns, Sam Peckinpah (1924-1984) came from a pioneering family. He was a difficult, self-destructive man who commanded the love and loyalty of those he worked with but was hated by studio bosses. His second western, the elegiac Ride the High Country (1962) established his reputation and is his most likable picture. But the fierce, nihilistic The ...

The title of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is nowhere explained in the film. The title of Michael Caton-Jones's Shooting Dogs, a gripping film set during the Rwandan massacres of 1994, is explained halfway through when a Belgian officer commanding a UN peace-monitoring force is confronted by the painful irony that he can kill dogs feeding off the corpses ...