I liked The French Connection, but didn't love it. The French Connection, as in the dude, was quite entertaining. More so than Popeye Doyle, I thought. The scene that really stuck out for me was the French dude and his sidekick eating a wonderful, lavish meal, taking their time and really savoring it, while Doyle and his sidekick stand out in the rain eating ( I think) cold pizza. A wonderful contrast that really summed up their differences.
William Friedken would later make To Live and Die In LA, which also features a spectacular car chase. He told his 2nd unit director that he'd only put a car chase in the movie if it could top TFC, and boy did it ever. They both had a wonderfully frantic edginess to them. Unlike, say, Bullit, you could actually sense the danger. It made you kind of nervous. The LA car chase covers a whole lot more ground, though, and more importantly, comes at a similarly frantic time in the movie. As I recall, Doyle was just being a cop chasing a bad guy. The two cops in LA were both in full blown panic mode already, to correspond to the franticness of the car chase. That really put it over the top.
I don't remember much about Boyz. What I recall was that it came out around the same time as Menace II Society, and obviously featured similar subject matter. Menace I remember thinking rather highly of. Boyz I've pretty much forgotten.
I also liked, but didn't love BCatSK. When I saw it as a kid I didn't appreciate the ending as much. As an adult I liked it a lot more. It seemed like they kind of sensed they had finally gotten in over their heads, but couldn't really accept it. Their was a pathos to their deaths as it just didn't seem like they understood it. Honestly, though, the movie mostly just suffers for not being any of the myriad Westerns I like a lot more. It's good, it's just not one of the great ones.
Highly recommend Kwai. Maybe a Top 10 movie of mine. Everything is top notch.
Not quite a top ten for me, but still one of my very favorites. Alec Guinness absolutely beats Colonel Saito into the ground. Just destroys him. It's both fun to watch him do it and yet you almost feel sorry for Saito's shame. And naturally I'm a big William Holden fan, so it's got that going for him. His attempt to get out of the mission really cracks me up, and yet once he's in he's all the way in.