To put together this list of the best action movies ever made, we polled over 50 experts in the field, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo, along with our Time Out writers, and the results show a genre as versatile as any other – and in many cases, way more fun.

And even those that aim for nothing more than visceral thrills can stick with you in a way more subdued and subtle films cannot. Some can karate chop you right in the heart. Many are beautiful and almost operatic in their orchestration of violence. But the truth is that action needn’t be dumb to succeed. In many ways, action flicks are cinema’s pressure relief valve, the thing you throw on to relieve your mind of the stresses of the modern world and massage that part of your brain that just wants to see some stuff get blowed up real good. Sometimes, all audiences want is to sit down in a theatre with a high-tech sound system and get their senses blown to bits by loud explosions, pulse-pounding car chases and well-detonated one liners – and in those instances, only an action movie will do. Snobby cineastes may insist otherwise, but the movies cannot survive on mannered costume dramas and four-hour experimental art films alone.

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