Cimarron

This is something of a complete disaster of a film. I kind of hated it. If this doesn't end up my least favorite Best Picture winner, I will be very surprised. There's an amateurishness to just so much of the film's craft that it boggles the mind that anyone would want to reward it for…

Advertisement

Cry Macho

#34 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. Not nearly the disaster that some critics made it out to be but also not that good either, Cry Macho was a script that author N. Richard Nash had been trying to get made since the early 1970s. It only took 20 years after Nash's death for…

Unforgiven

#1 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. When it comes to Clint Eastwood's directing work, it's important to separate the films he made for financial reasons (The Rookie, Firefox) from the ones that were more personal to him (Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, White Hunter Black Heart). This feels like the latter, a script he…

The Outlaw Josey Wales

#5 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. This is one of those movies where there really should be a co-directing credit. Phillip Kaufman co-wrote the script, went through all of the pre-production, and then filmed about the first two weeks of the shoot before Clint Eastwood convinced the producer, Robert Daley, to fire Kaufman…

High Plains Drifter

#11 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. This is just really well-made exploitation, isn't it? I'm not really complaining because Clint Eastwood, in his second outing as director, brings a professionalism and sense of class to both the directing and acting that the basic script doesn't seem to deserve, taking a simple tale of…