Clint Eastwood
294 connections found
Filmography
Letters from Iwo Jima 2006 
American Sniper 2014 
The Bridges of Madison County 1995 
J. Edgar 2011 
Breezy 1973 
Pale Rider 1985 
Unforgiven 1992 
High Plains Drifter 1973 
Million Dollar Baby 2004 
Mystic River 2003 
Gran Torino 2008 
Bird 1988 
The Outlaw Josey Wales 1976 
Invictus 2009 
Sully 2016 
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 1997 
Changeling 2008 
Jersey Boys 2014 
Richard Jewell 2019 
Hereafter 2010 
Flags of Our Fathers 2006 
Firefox 1982 
The Rookie 1990 
Juror #2 2024 
The Gauntlet 1977 
The Mule 2018 
A Perfect World 1993 
Heartbreak Ridge 1986 
Play Misty for Me 1971 
Space Cowboys 2000 
The 15:17 to Paris 2018 
True Crime 1999 
Cry Macho 2021 
Blood Work 2002 
Sudden Impact 1983 
Bronco Billy 1980 
White Hunter, Black Heart 1990 
Honkytonk Man 1982 
The Eiger Sanction 1975 
Absolute Power 1997 View:
Connections, in both directions
Prisoners (2013)
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
influenced by Mystic River (2003), Unforgiven (1992)
Themes Visuals
But like Clint Eastwood's Mystic River , to which it's been compared, Prisoners is so artfully shaped and forcefully developed that objections fade.
He fares impressively in the film, which is reminiscent of “Mystic River,” “In the Bedroom” and the crime dramas of David Fincher.
Villeneuve, who directed the fascinating 2010 film Incendies, plays with echoes of many of the better crime films of the past two decades, including The Vanishing, Mystic River , Gone Baby Gone , and, most notably, David Fincher's multiple contributions to the genre.
Along the route, the tone does shift from taut procedural (in the vein of, say, Zodiac) to something a little more melodramatic (think of the breathless Mystic River).
Shot in the hues of a cold rain by Roger A. Deakins ("No Country for Old Men," "Skyfall"), the film's missing-child-in-a-close-knit-community-with-secrets story is reminiscent of "Mystic River" while the police investigation in a rural blue collar town has the flavor of "Silence of the Lambs."
Prisoners is a heavy movie exploring serious themes, similar to the contemporary prestige procedurals Zodiac and Mystic River .
Logan (2017)
Directed by James Mangold
influenced by Unforgiven (1992), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), A Perfect World (1993), Gran Torino (2008), Pale Rider (1985)
Themes
Taking a page out of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, as well as perhaps Sam Peckinpah’s own story of American legends aging gracelessly in ignominious gore in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Logan opens on a grim and sparse future.
When Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, he filled it with everything he wanted to say about the Western, about violence, and the complexities and damage that violence does to the human soul.
So if you want a very general comparison, the tone and feel of Logan is sort of like if Clint Eastwood's character in Unforgiven had been a claw-wielding mutant and the story was set in the future instead of the past.
“Logan” calls back directly to “ Shane ,” including a scene in which the characters watch the film, but it has more echoes of late-career films for icons such as “ The Shootist ” and “ Unforgiven ” in the way it deconstructs the line between hero and legend.
In the way it explores the inescapable nature of violence and its long-term effects, Logan is the Unforgiven of superhero cinema.
With its overt allusions to Shane (clips of which are shown) and echoes of Unforgiven , Logan demands to be given consideration as a “serious” movie.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Gran Torino (2008), American Sniper (2014)
Visuals Themes
And, with the help of producer Steven Spielberg, he delivers a galvanizing vision of the war, empowered by Tom Stern's fantastic cinematography and further innovations in the special effects that made Saving Private Ryan so memorable.
Itâs impossible not to compare the landings on Iwo Jima with Spielbergâs heralded D-Day landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan.
The first assault on Iwo is not quite as heavy as the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, but it definitely shows the effect of bullets, fire, and grenades on the human body.
Given the decision to photograph Iwo Jima in Saving Private Ryan's limited palette of bleached blues and greens and the prominence of Ryan actors like Barry Pepper and Harve Presnell in Eastwood's supporting cast, it's tempting to see Flags as a Ryan redux -- a companion film of the Pacific theater to reflect back on Ryan's vision of the European one.
These epic-scale battle sequences, desaturated to the point where only the flash of shell explosions seem to show any brightness, are like an Eastern-arena complement to the Normandy landings seen in Saving Private Ryan (so no surprises that Steven Spielberg is a co-producer here) - or like The Thin Red Line without that film's lushly vivid colour scheme.
Flags of Our Fathers feels a bit like Saving Private Ryan's admiring little brother who wants to be just like him and copies him.
Similarly great films like “The Hurt Locker” and “Blackhawk Down” were more graphic (and just as profane) but not any more gripping.
For a man who saw a war through the scope of a rifle, the newfound mundaneness of his life is interesting, but it was portrayed far more effectively in the waning, wordless moments of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker.”
Of course, there have been great war films that didn’t deal directly with the politics of war itself—Kathryn Bigelow’s still-jarring The Hurt Locker (2009), for one—but those films succeeded because their depiction of war was so powerful and the central characters were so compelling.
As we learned from the best of the Vietnam war films, and as superb films about the Middle East war such as The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor and Zero Dark Thirty have reinforced, America's modern enemies - and, therefore, our enemies - don't recognise the uniforms, rules, protocols, theatres or even age limits of conventional warfare.
The scenes, rich and rife with conflict and drenched with sun and sand, feel borrowed from Katherine Bigelow’s haunting wartime chronicle “The Hurt Locker,” yet there’s no plumbing of the soul or genuine crisis of conscience in Eastwood’s endeavor.
“American Sniper” is an Iraq War movie, a genre so small it pretty much begins and ends with “The Hurt Locker.”
It’s either a new generation’s Sergeant York or the misguided American equivalent of that Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008).
Biopics about American war heroes are a Hollywood tradition going all the way back to Gary Cooper starring as the legendary World War I sharpshooter "Sergeant York" and World War II's highly decorated Audie Murphy playing himself in "To Hell and Back." "American Sniper" is squarely in that mold, but because it's directed by Clint Eastwood something else is going on as well.
Like The Hurt Locker and a century’s worth of war movies that preceded it—from Sergeant York to Saving Private Ryan—it provides an opportunity to examine the artistic representation of combat.
Eastwood’s Chris is a movie war hero with echoes of Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York , the good-ole-boy pacifist who won the Medal of Honor for killing 28 Germans and capturing another 132 in a World War I raid, and Jeremy Renner’s Sgt.
Bulked up yet still able to express his signature neuroticism (dialed down from the David O. Russell comedies), Cooper has never been better, registering a seesawing psychology on par with Gary Cooper’s turn in Sergeant York.
United 93 (2006)
Directed by Paul Greengrass
influenced Sully (2016), American Sniper (2014)
Themes Plot Visuals
Recent war films such as “Black Hawk Down” (2001), and “United 93” (2006) wear their obvious political ideologies on their sleeves.
The movie “Sully” reminded me the most of was another true-life airline drama “United 93,” which chronicled the doomed flight that crashed in Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.
So while the crash landing sequence will grip audiences, it doesn’t have the stamina to match other plane-drama films such as Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (still a masterpiece).
Even Paul Greengrass in his now forgotten United 93 (about the 9/11 hijacking of the plane that, headed for the Pentagon, crashed in Shanksville, Pa.) trivialized the experience in a hackneyed pretense of commemoration.
(It is in some ways the mirror image of Paul Greengrass’s heartfelt, harrowing United 93 .)
Eastwood wants to sensationalize the event by depicting Sully as something of a guilt ridden everyman, while also anxiously trying to film every event with a stark reality in the vein of “United 93.”
The Irishman (2019)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced by Unforgiven (1992), Gran Torino (2008)
Visuals Themes Plot
The multiple shootings and stabbings in “The Irishman” are subtly shot by Prieto in grainy, unshowy lenses reminiscent of Tom Stern’s photography in Clint Eastwood’s own mournful adieu "Gran Torino.”
It’s Scorese’s “Unforgiven,” a Catholic’s atonement for all the gilded Oscar glory that was a byproduct of his decades of gangland epics, from “Goodfellas” and “Casino” to “The Departed.”
Think Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" with a change in setting, rewritten by an altar boy who has seen things.
Like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in 1992, Martin Scorsese’s Irishman revises and demystifies the myths that made—and still entertain—America.
Coming as late in their careers as it is, there’s a temptation to say this is their final statement on the genre, a commentary that helps put their respective careers in context, much like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.”
Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour magnum opus — which reunites him with longtime collaborators Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci for the first time since 1995’s “Casino” — is a gangster movie to end all gangster movies, akin to Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” and John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” in that it finds a filmmaker reflecting on the genre he helped define, issuing what feels like his final word on the subject.
Rocky (1976)
Directed by John G. Avildsen
influenced Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Themes Plot Characters
Eastwood has crafted a boxing movie that holds more akin to the 1956 Paul Newman starrer, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” or “Requiem For A Heavyweight” than the “Rocky” franchise, to which it is most compared.
At least when Burgess Meredith did this stuff in the “Rocky” movies he had the good hammy sense to treat it like the hokum it was.
But she wears him down, and we figure we're in for another "Rocky."
The characters and dialogue bob and weave between Fat City authenticity, Rocky blue-collar romanticism and movie-of-the-week contrivance as the film pokes at the underbelly of society.
There is even a Villain, in the person of dirty-fighting former prostitute Billie "The Blue Bear" (Lucia Rijker), this movie's Mr. T to Maggie's Rocky.
Contrary to how the trailers make it appear, "Million Dollar Baby" is no mere distaff "Rocky."
The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
influenced by Pale Rider (1985), High Plains Drifter (1973), Unforgiven (1992)
Visuals Themes Plot Characters
It’s fun in the sense that you can reward yourself for spotting the references (Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter are given visual nods, while the raw style of Sergio Leone also looms large at several points).
This is not a new idea—it was the core of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985), for instance—but it gives the formula a more modern feel that makes it even easier to identify with the victims.
On the whole, the film, adapted by Nic Pizzolatto (“True Detective”) and Richard Wenk (“The Equalizer”), resembles Clint Eastwood’s 1985 masterpiece “Pale Rider” as much as John Sturges’ 1960 film.
It’s fun in the sense that you can reward yourself for spotting the references (Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider and High Plains Drifter are given visual nods, while the raw style of Sergio Leone also looms large at several points).
That is certainly the case with Chisolm, whose color, like that of Morgan Freeman’s character in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” (1992), goes unmentioned.
The western could be as deep as Unforgiven or as fun as the comic character studies of Cat Ballou, Support Your Local Sheriff and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
A History of Violence (2005)
Directed by David Cronenberg
influenced by Unforgiven (1992)
Characters Themes
He could be Cary Grant in "North by Northwest," an innocent man forced by mistaken identity into a life-or-death struggle, or maybe he's Clint Eastwood in "Unforgiven," a reformed gunslinger who has retreated to the quiet life but finds he hasn't washed all the blood off his hands.
There are strong parallels between A History of Violence and Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Unforgiven, in that both films examine once viciously violent men who have long since reformed, and have become domesticated family men, but who are eventually drawn back into their violent ways of old.
By degrees he insinuates the idea of violence as an inescapable destiny, redolent of Clint Eastwood's reformed killer in Unforgiven finding himself pulled back into the old ways.
Working from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, screenwriter Josh Olson creates a modern-day parallel to all those classic Westerns (from "The Gunfighter" to "Shane" to "The Shootist" to "Unforgiven") in which world-weary gunslingers naively think they can hang up their six-shooters -- at least until, inevitably, their violent pasts catch up with them.
The modern apex is the vigilante Western Unforgiven, in which a return to bloodshed costs the hero his soul—but the higher price (for him and at the box office) would have been leaving his buddy unavenged.
Ride the High Country (1962)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
influenced Unforgiven (1992)
Characters Themes
The graying gunfighters of David Webb Peoples's acutely observant script recall such classic films as John Ford's Searchers, Howard Hawks's El Dorado and Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country.
What Eastwood does with that anti-character here is similar to what Sean Connery did with the James Bond character in "Never Say Never Again" or what Sam Peckinpah did with the aging western heroes in "Ride the High Country."
For "Unforgiven," the story of a reformed killer who re-confronts his past, is very definitely an old-guy Western, as elegiac in its own way as such classics as "The Wild Bunch" and "Ride the High Country."
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
Directed by Michael Bay
influenced by American Sniper (2014)
Themes Characters
Most of all, it’s a tribute to the brave U.S. fighters who kept a horrific situation from turning much worse, and it’s on that support-our-troops score — which propelled “American Sniper” and “Lone Survivor” to surprise-hit status — that this Paramount release will have its best shot at connecting with war-weary domestic audiences beyond Bay’s fan base.
This is the kind of war film that will be a hard to shake off because it's so intense much like The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, Lone Survivor and Black Hawk Down.
Hoping to capitalize on the box-office bonanza of two previous rah-rah military movies that opened wide in January — Lone Survivor and American Sniper — Bay keeps blowing shit up for a punishing two hours and 24 minutes.
A moving tale of heroism and sacrifice wrapped in an explosive package that will quicken your pulse, 13 Hours is sure to appeal to the audiences that turned out for American Sniper and Lone Survivor.
His superior and friend is Tyrone “Rone” Woods (a beefed-up James Badge Dale), who is also there mainly for money, but it is hinted at that he likes being in the field (a point better explored in “American Sniper”).
War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Directed by Matt Reeves
influenced by The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Unforgiven (1992)
Visuals Characters Themes
As Caesar becomes obsessed with taking out the Colonel after a deadly strike against the apes’ camp, the film becomes a riff on classic Clint Eastwood revenge westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven.
Most of the spoken dialogue, by contrast, falls to Harrelson’s Colonel, a worthy new adversary who at one point gets a deranged, nihilistic monologue that further underscores his resemblance to Col. Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” That’s just one of a few classics that Reeves has cited as overt influences, including the Clint Eastwood western “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” biblical epics like “The Ten Commandments,” and the World War II-era classics “The Great Escape” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
There are scenes that feel straight out of a Clint Eastwood film – look for visual homages to The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven – and there are no rousing feelgood action-beat moments.
Like the recent Kong: Skull Island , it’s a half-hearted allegory for the Vietnam War, the war that has to stand in for all wars, because it’s the only one that American culture has deigned it okay to hate on; and like Logan , it’s a stealth Western passing itself off in a more marketable genre, with Serkis, the Lon Chaney of mo-cap, playing the graying, gun-slinging Caesar as an obvious, grimacing impression of Clint Eastwood circa The Outlaw Josey Wales .
As Caesar becomes obsessed with taking out the Colonel after a deadly strike against the apes’ camp, the film becomes a riff on classic Clint Eastwood revenge westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven.
There are scenes that feel straight out of a Clint Eastwood film – look for visual homages to The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven – and there are no rousing feelgood action-beat moments.
This results in some tense and sleepless nights for Sully but, dramatically speaking, the story is the inverse of that of the 2012 aviation drama Flight, in which Denzel Washington's pilot may have saved the day but had some personal issues eminently worthy of the inquiry board's attention.
This isn’t Flight, the Robert Zemeckis film in which Denzel Washington played a self-sabotaging top-notch commercial pilot who, after landing a plane in scarier circumstances than Sully faced, turns out to be concealing a chronic alcohol and drug problem.
“Sully” recalls 2012’s fictional drama “Flight,” which is like the dark, nightmare version of Sullenberger’s incident.
The unsettling dream sequence is strangely less exciting than such airline-disaster openings as those in “Flight” and “Alive.”
This isn’t Flight, after all.
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
influenced by The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Themes
The novel is very likely the worst-written international bestseller since the “Twilight” series and maybe since, once upon a time in the same kingdom of forbidden love, “The Bridges of Madison County.”
It’s no Clint Eastwood’s superheroic saving of “The Bridges of Madison County,” but it’ll do.
Rambo: Last Blood (2019)
Directed by Adrian Grünberg
influenced by Unforgiven (1992), Gran Torino (2008)
Visuals Themes
That’s not to say it can’t work; Clint Eastwood directed himself to Oscar glory as an aging gunslinger trying to escape his violent past in “Unforgiven” (1992), from which “Rambo: Last Blood” borrows a lot of graveside imagery.
Far from the moody, Unforgiven-lite meditation on violence and revenge it could have been, the fifth Rambo too often smacks of a generic studio thriller with a familiar franchise label slapped on it.
When the film’s teaser trailer released, many compared it to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) and James Mangold’s Logan (2017).
In reality, Last Blood‘s style and tone are closer to a Logan or Gran Torino, if fed through the chintzy glorified-VOD sausage factory.
First Man (2018)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
influenced by Sully (2016), American Sniper (2014)
Themes Visuals
We knew that Tom Hanks, as astronaut Jim Lovell, would survive a catastrophic mishap and make it home alive in Apollo 13—just as we knew that Hanks would safely ditch his plane in the Hudson River as an airline pilot in Sully.
I was reminded a bit of Sully, Clint Eastwood's movie from two years ago about pilot Sully Sullenberger and the flight he landed on the Hudson.
Whether aimed at Buddy Rich in “Whiplash” or at the classic-jazz pantheon (and an inspirational aunt) in “La La Land,” his reverence for past heroes is matched only by that of Steven Spielberg—who, notably, is an executive producer of “First Man.” Compare Chazelle’s direction to Clint Eastwood’s in “ Sully ,” which sees through the heroic protagonist’s public image and his sense of responsibility to his tragic consciousness.
When Chazelle is examining Neil's inarticulateness, "First Man" becomes a tragedy of American machismo, in the vein of " American Sniper " (which wasn't shy in admitting that its hero kept volunteering for combat duty because he couldn't deal with being a husband and father) and " The Deer Hunter " (in which straight white men expressed love for each other through pain and sacrifice).
Forget whether or not patriotism should even be a mission of a movie, or a barometer of its success as a film—the word for that, folks, is propaganda— First Man nonetheless may be the most patriotic drama we’ve seen since American Sniper .
American Sniper possesses the sweep and scope of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, but very little of that movie's romantic grandeur.
Not since The Deer Hunter, however, has Hollywood done such justice as American Sniper to polemical wars?
Like Michael Cimino’s similarly themed Vietnam war epic The Deer Hunter, Stone’s film eschewed the sentimental, jingoistic tone of World War II combat films, revising their tropes of greatest-generation heroism and camaraderie to reflect a more caustic viewpoint about a more divisive war.
It’s a moment similar to when The Deer Hunter (1978) arrived.
Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)
Directed by Robert Wise
influenced Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Themes
Eastwood has crafted a boxing movie that holds more akin to the 1956 Paul Newman starrer, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” or “Requiem For A Heavyweight” than the “Rocky” franchise, to which it is most compared.
News of the World (2020)
Directed by Paul Greengrass
influenced by Unforgiven (1992)
Visuals Characters Themes
He’s not a regretful sinner like Eastwood’s William Munny in Unforgiven , nor is he a veteran harboring racist feelings towards the Native Americans like Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (though Greengrass doesn’t miss a chance to pay homage to a famous shot from that film).
Hanks is watchable as always, playing Kidd as an amalgam of Rooster Cogburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven , your classic American hero who doesn’t start a fight but is willing to finish one, who stands up for the little guy but doesn’t want to make a big thing out of it.
It’s the kind of raw, revisionist stamp that separated Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” (1992), Kevin Costner’s “Open Range” (2003) and most of Sam Peckinpah’s Western classics from the morally right black-and-white Hollywood studio staples.
Es el tipo de sello revisionista crudo que separó Unforgiven de Clint Eastwood (1992), Open Range de Kevin Costner (2003) y la mayoría de los clásicos occidentales de Sam Peckinpah, de los básicos de los estudios de Hollywood en blanco y negro moralmente correctos.