Robert Redford was among the largest stars of the 1970s, in Butch Cassidy, The Sting, All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor, and was rarely given credit for how carefully he chose material.
He won Best Director for Ordinary People, which beat Raging Bull, and directed Quiz Show and A River Runs Through It afterward.
The Sundance Institute and Festival, which he founded, effectively created the American independent film sector as an industry, and that is the more consequential legacy.
All Is Lost, made when he was seventy-seven, has almost no dialogue and carries an entire film alone at sea. He retired from acting in 2018.
Jeff CoreyButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. William Goldman sold the screenplay for four hundred thousand dollars and the film is a comedy about two men becoming obsolete. The freeze frame…
Delle BoltonJeremiah Johnson (1972) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man goes into the mountains to be alone and the film spends two hours on the practical difficulty of that. Almost no dialogue, real winter, and a…
Barbara HersheyThe Natural (1984) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Levinson took a bleak 1952 novel about a man who takes the bribe and inverted its ending completely, which is either the film's great betrayal or the reason…
Cliff RobertsonThree Days of the Condor (1975) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man who reads books for the CIA goes out for lunch and comes back to find everybody he works with shot. The film changed…
Klaus Maria BrandauerSydney Pollack's 1985 Karen Blixen Kenya romance. Out of Africa is Sydney Pollack's 1985 American romantic drama adapted from Isak Dinesen's memoir, depicting a Danish baroness who establishes a coffee plantation in colonial Kenya and conducts a romance with a…
Jane AlexanderRosenberg's 1980 prison-reform drama. Robert Redford as the warden who arrives undercover as an inmate.
Anthony HopkinsRichard Attenborough's massive ensemble WWII epic about Operation Market Garden. Legendary cast across Allied and German command.
Anthony MackieThe Russo brothers' 1970s political thriller in superhero clothing. Robert Redford, Chris Evans, and the MCU's peak film.
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