Manhunt with Walter Pidgeon trying to assassinate Hitler and the re-make “Rogue Male” with Peter O’Toole.
A few more that haven’t been mentioned yet:
John Woo’s The Killer, with Chow Yun-Fat
Don Siegel’s Charlie Varrick, with Joe Don Baker doing a memorable turn as a hit man (ETA: oops, denquixote got there first)
Prime Cut, another one with Lee Marvin
The Hit, with John Hurt, Terence Stamp and Tim Roth
I would have to say the best hitman movie made in the last 10 years was the absolutely terrific Belgian thriller **The Memory of a Killer**, about a hitman taking on one final assignment (and ensuing complications) while also dealing with the early onset of Alzheimer’s. It’s a film where the cops aren’t stooges and the “hero” is sympathetic but complicated. It’s got plenty of visual style to burn, but also takes some interesting directions in the story without being gratuitous or insulting your intelligence. Definitely worth checking out.
Pretty good, but I found the premise that Antonio Banderas is going for The Record a bit hard to swallow – I think most professional criminals understand perfectly well that fame is the one luxury they cannot afford. (Look what happened to John Gotti.)
It wasn’t perfect, but I really liked Lucky Number Slevin. (How many Bruce Willis movie are going to show up on this list?)
**The Manchurian Candidate **features an unwilling hitman. Check out the earlier one for, IIRC, a downright evil Angela Lansbury.
Diary of a Hitman, featuring Forest Whitaker and a supremely hot Sherilyn Fenn.
As mentioned, Golgo the assassin does none of the usual things Hollywood hitmen do, and his first film at least (I didn’t bother with the second on the basis of reviews) is in the middle of his career.
If you can stand animation, it does a good job of capturing a comic book feel and I don’t mean that in a bad way certainly.
Le Samourai (1967) with Alain Delon.
Long Kiss Goodnight - amnesiatic hitwoman
I third {fourth, whatever} The Day Of The Jackal. A masterpiece of tight film-making: there’s not a scene, a shot or a line of dialogue wasted. James Fox is utterly compelling as the ruthless yet utterly professional assassin: half of you wants him to succeed, the other half is yelling “For Christ’s sake stop him!”. An excellent police procedural, too: they don’t catch him by blind luck, deus ex machina or his own vaunting hubris, either: just by dogged persistence and sheer hard work.
Over the Bruce Willis remake let us cast a discreet veil, since the makers apparently picked out all the elements that made the original great, and then induced a dog to be violently and copiously sick all over them.
Thirded also is The Matador: certainly flawed, but very good in messing with a lot of the steely-eyed stone killer cliches of the genre, with Pierce Brosnan’s anti-Bond turn as a boorishly lecherous hebephile drunk. Excellent support work from Greg Kinnear, and a splendid twist in that…
…Greg Kinnear owes Pierce Brosnan a professional favour not because Brosnan killed Kinnear’s business rival in Mexico and thus paved the way to Kinnear’s success - as afficionados of the genre smugly concluded early on - but precisely because Brosnan refused the contract.
Just thought of another: the Hitchcockian - and vastly under-rated - Nick Of Time, in which villanous Christopher Walken kidnaps innocent everyman Johnny Depp’s daughter, in order to blackmail Depp into carrying out a political assassination. The catch? Depp only has just over an hour to do it, and the movie plays out in real time…
You mean, other than in the OP?