Ronan Doyle is an Irish freelance film critic, whose work has appeared on Indiewire, FilmLinc, Film Ireland, FRED Film Radio, and otherwhere. He recently contributed a chapter on Arab cinema to the book Celluloid Ceiling, and is currently entangled in an all-encompassing volume on the work of Woody Allen. When not watching movies, reading about movies, writing about movies, or thinking about movies, he can be found talking about movies on Twitter. He is fuelled by tea and has heard of sleep, but finds the idea frightfully silly.
Boldly announcing himself upon the stage of international cinema with 2009’s Let the Right One In, the significant critical and commercial acclaim accorded director Thomas Alfredson clearly proved him a filmmaker capable of pulling off high quality adaptations of complex and dark literary sources.
For his tenth directorial outing, Eastwood headed up Sudden Impact, the fourth film of the Dirty Harry series. Taking the reins of the franchise that had made him an American icon, he brought his own distinctive stamp to a well-established formula.
Often mentioned by Eastwood alongside Bronco Billy as his personal favourites among his oeuvre, Honkytonk Man pulls back the pace from the poorly received action of Firefox, released earlier the same year.
Known for both maintaining longstanding relationships with his crew and carefully controlling his productions—his reputation for bringing films in on schedule and under budget is almost legendary—Eastwood assumed a new role in 1982 with Firefox, stepping in as producer after the retirement of Robert Daley, with whom he had worked since Play Misty for Me.
In 1980, the same year in which Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate damaged the reputation of the western— not to mention United Artists and the New Hollywood movement— almost irreparably, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in Bronco Billy, an elegiac farewell to the genre’s glory days.
Much as his previous film The Outlaw Josey Wales utilized and built upon aspects of his established western archetype, Eastwood’s sixth film The Gauntlet followed on from the tough urban cop persona he had developed in Coogan’s Bluff and brought to fame with Dirty Harry and its (then) two sequels.
Having somewhat spurned his career—not to mention his relationship with Universal—with the critically derided The Eiger Sanction, 1976 saw Eastwood’s return to more familiar territory with the western The Outlaw Josey Wales, his first of an impressive 23 directorial credits to date under newly assumed home Warner Bros.
The nineteenth feature film from acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, and his first collaborative effort with Antonio Banderas since 1990, The Skin I Live In is a dark tale of loss which echoes the ethical concerns of Frankenstein.
His fourth directorial outing, The Eiger Sanction is the film which—following a calamitous reception—infamously led to Eastwood’s embittered departure from Universal, the studio with which he had produced his previous three films as director, and with which he would not again work until 2008’s Changeling, some 33 years later.
Far more familiar to audiences as an actor than a director at this early point of his career, Eastwood’s 1973 Breezy marks a further brave move for the budding career: his opting to solely direct and forgo the benefit of his acting stardom.