Kevin Costner had one of the largest runs in Hollywood between 1987 and 1992: The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, JFK and The Bodyguard. Dances with Wolves won him Best Director and Best Picture.
Waterworld and The Postman then became shorthand for expensive failure, and his standing took a decade to recover.
The westerns are the throughline. Open Range, Wyatt Earp, Dances with Wolves and the self-financed Horizon suggest a genuine conviction about the form and not a commercial calculation.
He has been most consistently good in sports films, where his particular quality, a decent man who is quietly stubborn, fits exactly.
Floyd Red Crow WestermanDances with Wolves (1990) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a three-hour Western largely in Lakota with subtitles, which nobody wanted financed, and it made four hundred million dollars and beat Goodfellas. The film is…
Brian DennehySilverado (1985) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lawrence Kasdan made a Western in a decade that had stopped making them, assembled four leads before any of them were famous, and built it out of every convention…
Annette BeningOpen Range (2003) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a slow, patient Western about two cattlemen who decide to kill a rancher, and then staged the best gunfight in the genre's last forty years. It…
James RussoThe Postman (1997) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner turned a satirical novel about a con man into a three hour sincere epic about American institutions, and ended it with a statue of himself. It took…
Alan RickmanKevin Costner, Alan Rickman scene-stealing as Sheriff. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is Kevin Reynolds's 1991 American adventure film.
Andy GarciaBrian De Palma's 1987 Eliot Ness biopic. Costner, Connery, De Niro as Capone.
Kevin CostnerRon Shelton's 1988 minor league baseball comedy. The rare sports film that captures the actual sport's culture.
Donald Sutherland1991 Oliver Stone conspiracy drama with Kevin Costner as New Orleans DA Jim Garrison prosecuting Clay Shaw for the Kennedy assassination. JFK is Oliver Stone's 1991 American historical drama.
Cary ElwesRobin Hood is one of the most adapted properties in English-language popular culture. The legend traces back to medieval English ballads from at least the fifteenth century.
Dennis HopperWaterworld had one genuine asset going in: a production design concept that was visually striking and physically coherent. A world covered in water would.
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