“I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots, or only five?” Western icon Clint Eastwood and lean, terse director Don Siegel brought frontier justice to the American cop picture with the angry, violent maverick cop Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971). Striding the streets of San Francisco with a .44 Magnum (“the most […]
Mystic River (2003) – Three adolescent boys write their names in the wet cement of a newly poured sidewalk patch in their Boston neighborhood, but the last boy is interrupted, his name unfinished when he’s taken away in a car by two men who purport to be cops but are child molesters who torture him […]
There’s something of a shaggy dog story quality to Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), an offbeat road movie / caper film starring Clint Eastwood as Thunderbolt, an ex-thief on the run from his former partners, and Jeff Bridges as a hotshot kid who calls himself Lightfoot and decides to become this flinty veteran’s sidekick. They’re unlikely […]
There are two kinds of people, my friend. Those who love Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and those who resist the machismo and gallows humor of what is arguably the definitive spaghetti western. Leone’s first real attempt at mythologizing his vision of the American west (shot, of course, in the […]
“I don’t deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house.” “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western Unforgiven earned the director his first Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Director. In a way, it finally made official what critics and fans had slowly come to realize over the last […]
Always one of America’s most undervalued directors, Clint Eastwood is proving himself the American cinema’s national treasure in the third act of his impressive career. Million Dollar Baby (2004), an understated, unpretentious, powerfully told drama, adapted from F.X. Toole stories by Paul Haggis, earned Eastwood his second round of Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture […]
When Sergio Leone’s sunbaked A Fistful of Dollars (1967) rode into American theaters, caked in dust and sweat and stubble, critics dismissed it a cheap western, and a European knock-off at that. It was a blatant rip-off of Akira Kurosawa’s cynical samurai hit Yojimbo with American TV star Clint Eastwood, known to audiences as the impetuous […]
Sully (2016) is a fittingly modest nickname for an unassuming career airline pilot who became an American hero in 2009. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was piloting a routine flight from LaGuardia when his Airbus airliner was disabled over New York City mere minutes after take-off and he ditched in a water landing in the Hudson River […]
For the past twenty years, one-time screen superstar Clint Eastwood has been more active behind the camera than in front of it, plugging along with his old school filmmaking with a consistency that is hard to match. He’s already won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars twice (for Unforgiven, 1992, and Million Dollar Baby, 2004). […]
