Kevin Conley asked stuntmen what they considered the best stunt films of all time:
The Matrix Trilogy: Hard to put a Keanu vehicle at the top of any list, but the film changed the business for stuntmen. As they explain it, producer Joel Silver traveled to China to beg a reluctant Yuen Wo-Ping, the action director for such kung fu classics as Iron Monkey and Fist of Legend, to choreograph the fighting in this movie, and Wo-Ping set ridiculous demands in the hopes that Silver would just go away: a huge budget, a ridiculous salary, and six months of training with the actors and stuntmen. Much to his surprise, Silver agreed to everything, and when the series became a blockbuster, the practice of hiring stuntmen for lengthy training and rehearsal periods took off.Stagecoach: Stunt folk don’t watch the whole movie anymore, since now you can just check out the most famous and dangerous stunt ever on the Internet. Yakima Canutt, doubling an Apache, rides up to a team of horses, leaps over the lead horse onto the hitch between them, gets shot off, falls to the ground, slides between the hooves of the running horses and under the axles of the stagecoach wheels. In Zorro’s Fighting Legion and Idaho, Yak catches onto the back of the wagon then climbs up and over it and gets into a fistfight with the driver, but in Stagecoach, the most successful of the three movies, he skips that part and just lies dead on the dry bed of Monument Valley.
Read the whole list.