I never realized Robert Redford's early career featured a role in Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone series, so I immediately found and watched it as part of a post-mortem Redford retrospective. Then I watched All Is Lost, his terrific 2013 stranded-at-sea movie. That movie and the TV show make strong bookends for his life and career, as he goes from this almost golden-god figure to a weathered, experienced, but still very boy-scout-like man in the twilight zone between life and death.

"Nothing in the Dark" isn't a classic Twilight Zone episode in the nature of "Living Doll" (seas. 5, ep. 6), where the secretly sentient Talky Tina doll torments Telly Savalas's jerk character. Or the many great Bill Mumy episodes. But it still creates and maintains a spooky mood, with Robert Redford playing a police officer who convinces a paranoid old woman to let him in her apartment while he recovers from a gunshot wound.

Eventually -- spoiler alert here -- we find out Redford is the personification of Death himself, disguised to get past the defenses of an elderly woman (wonderfully played by Glady Cooper) whose obsessive fear of death has caused her to shut out life as well. Redford is no menacing droogy intruder ala A Clockwork Orange, nor a phantom shapeshifter like the deathly figures in It Follows. Instead, he is a smooth, gentle version of Death, easing the woman's fear and coaxing her to a peaceful transition.  

The way Redford plays this part is interesting in how graceful and sensitive it is. I never considered him a master thespian as an actor -- he always pretty much just played himself -- but he already found a way to make it not matter.

It's a little haunting to watch "Nothing in the Dark"'s ending, because the way the old woman dies seems like a premonition of Redford's passing, 60-some years later, in which he reportedly died peacefully in his sleep (at age 89, on September 16, 2025).

The old woman's words before she dies feel like a reflection of Redford's real life:

"I was getting older, and my time was coming. I was young once. People said I was pretty. I lived out in the sunlight. People said I'd spoil my fine complexion. I didn't care. I loved outdoor things."

Redford's character comforts her with dulcet sympathy:

"It isn't me you're afraid of. What you're afraid of is in the unknown. Don't be afraid. The running's over. It's time to rest. Give me your hand. You see, no shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning."

I'm sorry to say I haven't seen Robert Redford's breakthrough, career-launching films.

Barefoot in the Park features one of his first potent romantic team-ups, opposite Jane Fonda. (They had also been in Arthur Penn's 1966 film The Chase.) The film is based on Neil Simon's 1963 play about young newlyweds who make peace with the shabbiness of their first home together, a flaw-ridden apartment in New York City. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Downhill Racer is the directing debut of Michael Ritchie, who later made one of my childhood favorite films, The Bad News Bears (1976), not to mention the always-rewatchable Fletch (1985). Almost any list of Redford's high points will mention Downhill Racer, so I feel like a big idiot not having seen it yet. I hate admitting something like that, because I have friends who will needle me further with a reaction like, "You haven't seen Downhill Racer?"

The film is about a pro skier competing in competitions both in the Alps and the Rocky Mountains, and it pairs Redford with another charismatic icon we lost just a few months earlier, Gene Hackman. It also has a love story about the athlete's romance with a woman played by Swedish beauty Camilla Sparv.

Roger Ebert called Downhill Racer "the best movie ever made about sports -- without really being about sports at all." So, a paradox. (I recently caught the Ted Lasso TV show for the first time and it also might be the best TV show I've seen about sports that is almost completely not about sports. Though I haven't completely worked out what exactly it is about.)

The idea of a sports movie that's not really about sports becomes a recurring theme for several of Redford's later films. (I am sure anybody would also agree that A River Runs Through It is the best movie about fly-fishing that isn't really about fly-fishing at all.)

Should you see them?: Of course! You and me both.

I've seen both of the Redford/Newman teamups, but so long ago I only remember bits and pieces. I absolutely will watch them again, and you should too.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is peak Hollywood. It has a double-wattage star duo of Redford and Paul Newman, a screenplay by the esteemed William Goldman (known for, among other things, The Princess Bride), and was part of Redford's ongoing collaboration with the director George Roy Hill. Oh yeah, it also features the charming actress Katharine Ross (Elaine Robinson in The Graduate, soon to become one of The Stepford Wives). She plays Redford's romantic interest (he knew how to pick 'em), who somehow ends up goofing around on a bike with Paul Newman in what has to be one of the goofiest scenes in Hollywood history -- made doubly so because it's accompanied by B.J. Thomas's inexplicable hit song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head."

From what I remember, the movie mashes up several tropes including the Not-at-All-Homoerotic Buddy Road Movie, the Goofy Bicycle Scene Set to a Song About Rain Even Though It's Not Raining, the Antihero Western Criminals With Hearts and Sideburns of Gold, and the Final Doomed Shootout With the Bolivian Army Unleashing a Bonnie & Clyde Hail of Bullets Into Wild Bunch Slo-mo Oblivion and/or an Iconic Freeze Frame Ending.

If my memory about the film is spotty it might because I sometimes confuse it with its Mad Magazine satire, titled Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid.

Redford used the "Sundance Kid" name, minus the "Kid" part, as a lifelong moniker. To Paul Newman's credit, he did not follow suit and build a non-profit foundation around the name "Butch," going the real-name route with for his esteemed Newman's Own charity. (Who would want to eat Butch Salad Dressing?)

Redford and Newman became good friends, and it's fun to think of their camraderie especially when you contrast it with the inane competition that Steve McQueen and Newman got into about top billing for Towering Inferno (1974) -- a pissing match that could put out the fire on a skyscraper.

Newman and Redford reteamed for The Sting, another George Roy Hill-directed caper film and period piece. This time the associated hit song was "The Entertainer" by Scott Joplin (freshly recorded and arranged by Marvin Hamlisch), and the Mad Magazine satire was titled The Zing.

I admit it: "The Entertainer" was my favorite song as a little kid, and might be one of the reasons I tend to prefer instrumentals to songs with lyrics. The movie was certainly an "entertainer," and was a massive popular hit, turning its $5.5 million budget into $257 million in box-office returns. It was a critical hit too, except with The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who said she "found it visually claustrophobic, and totally mechanical. It keeps cranking on, section after section, and it doesn't have a good spirit."

I'm guessing of all the results Robert Redford was expecting from making The Sting, trigger a popular resurgence of ragtime music, inspiring the future plots of numerous David Mamet screenplays (such as House of Games or The Spanish Prisoner), and making poor Pauline Kael feel like she was stuck in a refrigerator was not among them.

Should you see this?: Heck yeah. Maybe as an integral part of a film festival of other Paul Newman greats, like The Hustler, The Verdict, Hud, and Cool Hand Luke.

Jeremiah Johnson ranks at the top of any list of Robert Redford films, though its legacy seems to have receded into the "deep background" (if you'll excuse the All the President's Men reference). The film gained recent, inexplicably silly internet exposure due to a well-circulated .GIF featuring a zoom-in shot of Robert Redford's grinning, half-turned, full-bearded face from one of the scenes.

Set in what is probably the 1850s, the story is based on the real-life, eponymous mountain man. Jeremiah Johnson was a Mexican War veteran who, with perhaps few other career options, chose to become a lone Rocky Mountains animal trapper and fur trader. Inexperienced as an outdoorsman, he barely survives his first winter, but hones his skill set with the aid of a friendly mentor. Along the way he meets a Native American from the Crow tribe, named Paints-His-Shirt-Red, and several other colorful people.

One of the film's screenwriters was John Milius, and you can see foreshadowing of the film he later directed, Conan the Barbarian (1982). Both films have a hapless, wandering hero who meets oddball characters, adapts to strange scenarios, and ends up motivated at least in part by revenge.

For its time, Jeremiah Johnson was a trailblazing Revisionist Western, opposing the traditional John Wayne mold that often pitted "civilized" frontiersmen against unambiguously evil outlaws and "savage" Native Americans. Instead of the saguaro-cactus Arizona-exteriors, cowboy hats, and soundstage-interiors look of many John Ford or Howard Hawks westerns, Jeremiah Johnson is shot completely on location in eastern Utah, and is loaded with Aspen trees, massive mountain backgrounds, furry hats, sandstone formations and authentic natural danger (though I'm pretty sure I spotted a Sundance ski-run on one of the mountains).

Jeremiah Johnson took a thouroughly natural approach as opposed to the cartoony The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966); or the grime-and-sludge experimental feel of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). It's also comparable to The Revenant (2015), with its many scenes in snow alongside ice-cold forest streams.

In Jeremiah Johnson's story, no characters are good or bad, and many of Johson's decisions have no "correct" answer. He saves the life of a man who Natives buried up to his neck in sand, and then the rash behavior of that man (who had shaved his head bald to avoid being scalped) almost getting Johnson killed. Later, enlisted to help locate settlers stuck in a snowy area, he is pressured against his wishes to travel through a Native burial ground, and the offended natives hold him fully accountable.

Jeremiah Johnson has a symmetry in its first and second half (and the film is epic enough to have an intermission). At first, Johnson's naive and incompetent ways are a liability to himself and others. Later on he meets and helps people who are also liabilities. Along the way he accidentally gains, and loses, a family. If the movie has a take-away it is that all human conflicts and foibles are tiny compared to the vast, harsh wildnerness of the Rocky Mountains. The story starts out like a Jack London parable and ends with a feeling of Zen acceptance.

Watching Jeremiah Johnson, scene after scene feels so authentically lived-in, you get the sense that Redford and director Sydney Pollack had made reverence for the setting's history a personal mission. They also taught gentlemen a valuable lesson: If your lover has a neck rash, shave your full beard, even if you've got to sharpen a rock knife. She'll be very grateful.

Is seeing this worth the trouble?: To quote Jeremiah: "Huh? What trouble?"

These are three big Robert Redford movies I haven't seen -- yet. The Candidate, another collaboration with director Michael Ritchie, was Redford's early foray into political drama and social satire. American politics was certainly ripe for this sort of film, which came out the same year as Hunter S. Thompson debuted his "gonzo journalism" approach with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. The story has Redford as an up-and-coming California Senator. After several years of Ronald Reagan as the state's governor, I'm sure people needed a good laugh. (The film might make a good double feature with Warren Beatty's inspired 1998 film Bulworth.)

The Way We Were re-teams Redford with director Sydney Pollack, for a romantic drama opposite Barbra Streisand. The movie, yet another Redford movie to spawn a hit song, is your classic "apolitical WASP meets Marxist Jew in college, they hook up and break the 1970s WASP/Jew romantic boundary years before Annie Hall, WASP and Jew get caught in McCarthyist censorship troubles and have a bittersweet break-up" story. Or something like that. The movie was a hit, and probably would be an interesting double feature alongside Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) if you have five hours to spare.

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), directed by George Roy Hill, is a 1920 story about a former WWI pilot who does a lot of barnstorming and whatnot in the 1920s. Obviously I haven't seen it, but I do like getting the chance to use the word "barnstorming," as it doesn't come up very often. I'm not entirely sure what it means. Is it related to cloudbusting? I don't get to talk about planes called Sopwith Camels either. If there's no hump is it a Sopwithout Camel? A Sopwith Dromedary? (Dad jokes, sorry.) Anyway, I'd watch the movie just to see what Margot Kidder was up to in the years between Sisters (1972) and Superman (1978). The film might also bookend nicely with The Right Stuff and The Aviator.

You know you've made it as an actor when you're cast to be Jay Gatsby, title character of the #1 Great American Novel. The 1925 F. Scot Fitzgerald book was a high-school English class mainstay for decades, and perhaps still is -- though I can imagine a teacher these days having to defend the novel against meme-minded students quickly dismissing Gatsby as a stalker, Nick Carraway an enabler. Which is probably somewhat fair, but you know, at least Gatsby had a heart and wasn't a racist aristocrat-style industrialist abusive adulterer like Tom Buchanan, you know?

I can also imagine students getting The Great Gatsby confused with The Big Lebowski, watching the movie the night before the test, then showing up at class and wondering why none of the test questions are about bowling, nihilists, or vikings singing opera.

Anyway, Robert Redford wasn't a shoo-in for the role, and the backstory of the movie's production has become legend in its own right, and somehow is even linked to the time actress Ali MacGraw ran out on her husband, producer Robert Evans, to get it on with actor Steve McQueen. It was MacGraw's idea to remake The Great Gatsby, and she wanted to be in the pivotal role of Daisy Buchanan, the object of desire represented by the flashing green light across the bay, and for whom Gatsby carries a torch the size of that held by the Statue of Liberty.

According to Evans's 1994 book, The Kid Stays in the Picture, the first actor lined up was Warren Beatty, but he didn't want to work with MacGraw, for reasons unstated. Jack Nicholson also turned it down. Finally the role went to Robert Redford, who plays the part opposite a who's-who list of '70s-era actors that includes Sam Waterston, Mia Farrow, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, and Edward Herrmann.

The movie looks amazing and the sets, props, costumes, locations, and fancy shirts have a "spared no expense" quality to them. But the script, which seemingly was cobbled together after earlier takes by Truman Capote and Francis Ford Coppola, is like a by-the-numbers version of the novel's chapters. The movie's tone feels "off," as if the director, Jack Clayton, was overwhelmed by making every herringbone floor and tailored pink suit look right, and lost the psychological plot. (Clayton did a better job in 1983 adapting Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.) The cinematographyby Douglas Slocombe goes in for close-up shots way more than necessary; at one point the camera seems to be giving Karen Black a dental exam.

Robert Redford doesn't show up until about 45 minutes into the movie, with a lot of enigmatic build-up beforehand. I've seen varying opinions about his performance, but after the lovably kooky overacting of Karen Black (as Myrtle Wilson), awkwardness of Mia Farrow (Daisy), and Silent Running-level tirades of Bruce Dern, Redford's relative calm evens out the movie and makes Carraway's (Waterston's) fondness for him understandable. Some of the best performances are the smaller roles, such as Brooke Adams in a party scene, and particularly Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker. (She had the unfortunate fate to end up associated with the name "Ms. Goodhead" in the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker.)

I wouldn't consider this Redford's better performance, and it's not a great movie. Roger Ebert summed it up with, "But we don't feel. We've been distanced by the movie's overproduction." Yet it's still quite an eyeful -- and a better option than the pop-song-infused 2013 Baz Luhrman version. After four versions of the film, it remains true as always: Some novels that defy adaptation, and there's no substitute for just reading and letting your own imagination be the director.

I vividly remember my English teacher being sick for the week, and our substitute was a black man who clearly was from a rougher part of the city than my suburban high school. He'd been assigned to show every class Redford's Great Gatsby movie to fill in the time. He'd never read or seen it, but found it fascinating and recapped the story in his own, relatable language. Talking about the ending, he said, "Daisy mows down Myrtle, and Gatsby takes the rap!" We loved it. To this day when I think of the movie, I think of that substitute saying, "Gatsby takes the rap!"

A telling detail about the production: Mia Farrow "found it hard to establish a rapport with her co-star, who was obsessed with the unfolding real-life drama of the Watergate scandal and who, when not on camera, spent nearly all his time in his trailer, watching the coverage of the Watergate hearings on TV." Not only does that sound like a similar anecdote I've read about Leonardo DiCaprio (the later Gatsby), but it explains why All the President's Men is one of Redford's best works while Gatsby ranks much lower.

Worth seeing? Not unless you've read the novel first. 

Three Days of the Condor is peak 1970s paranoia, right up there with Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, and John Schlesinger's The Marathon Man. The country had been reeling for more than a decade after several political assassinations, the Vietnam War, and most recently the Watergate scandal. The mood was dark. The paranoids were out to get us.

(This site's writer, Sean Keller, picked it among cinema's most paranoid films, and site writer Tyler Doupé also considers it a favorite.)

Out of everything he'd done up to then, Redford's role in this Sydney Pollack film was the most in line with the protagonist in a Hitchcock thriller. He plays a bookish CIA analyst at the non-descript offices of what's outwardly a historical-literature society. One day he runs off to grab a sandwich, then comes back to find that everybody in his office has been killed. It's a scary starting point, but on another level, it's a great advertisement for going out to get a sandwich. (We never do find out much more about the sandwich, but I imagine it was lightly toasted, had cold cuts and green peppers, with soft havarti cheese, shredded lettuce doused with vinegar and oil, and perhaps some brown mustard. Never watch this movie hungry.)

Redford's great in the role, running around New York trying to investigate what happened while also on the run from an assassin. Who can he trust? Turns out: Nobody. Eventually he takes a woman hostage and forces her to let him stay in her apartment. She's played by Faye Dunaway, fresh off of Chinatown and thankfully with much thicker eyebrows. Redford's hair is in fine (coarse?) form too: Full and with a bit o' the ol' mutton choppage along the sides.

Normally being held hostage in one's apartment would be a nightmare, but since the hostage-taker is Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway soon sleeps with him. It's one of Hollywood's strangest tropes: Don't let the trauma of all your colleagues being murdered get in the way of having sex with someone you've just met and are holding hostage. (To be fair, the movie sets this up more believably than it sounds.)

Three Days of the Condor has a vice-tightening quality, along with a progressively unconvered conspiracy, that keeps it entertaining right to the end. It also has a spooky performance by Max Von Sydow, an assassin with a Grim Reaper silhouette and an assassin's code of ethics that leads to a surprise ending. As a bonus, it's one of the few films shot in the lobby of the World Trade Center in southern Manhattan -- which puts a queasy future spin on the foreboding story. It's a good, pulpy movie with Redford in his prime. And its narrative structure and paranoid feel set the stage for the masterpiece he made the following year.

This is Robert Redford's crowning achievement, a work of cinematic art that shaped public understanding of a major political and historical event, as well as amplifying the cause of investigative journalism. Redford wasn't just the co-star (along with Dustin Hoffman), he was the prime mover who proposed the movie's creation from its inception point. Redford even changed the nature of the book upon it was based, approaching Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and convincing them to write the book not just about the Watergate scandal but about the step-by-step process they went through during the initial stages of their investigation.

All the President's Men is a case of a Hollywood actor fully using his stardom clout to accomplish something well beyond box-office returns and red-carpet attention. Director Alan J. Pakula's thriller skills, combined with William Goldman's screenplay and Gordon Willis's deep-focus cinematography, were all working at full capacity -- making every scene, line, and image a building block of an intricate real-life detective procedural.

I've met a lot of journalists who, when asked why they decided to become reporters, say they were inspired by All the President's Men. Anybody who sees the film will have an enhanced respect for the amount of work it takes to not just piece together a story, but establish every fact and convince key sources that it's worth the trouble to "go on the record." Facts aren't facts unless you can verify them. A story isn't news unless it can be confirmed.

The story starts with a few men caught during a late-night break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in the nation's capital. This would be a small-crime story -- just another burglary -- if reporters (including Redford's Bob Woodward) didn't attend a court hearing and notice that the men's burglars' assigned public defenders had been replaced by expensive lawyers who refused to disclose who had hired them. Woodward starts checking names and making phone calls, and soon the people on the other end of the line are issuing nervous denials and contradicting themselves.

Redford had limitations as an actor, but the role of Woodward played to his strengths: Observing, concentrating, listening -- lots of internal mental strengths that come out in subtle ways under pressure, revealing traces of excitement as he discovers the story he's reporting keeps leading him up the chain of executive political power.

Woodward was a rookie reporter at the Washington Post and needed some backup, soon teaming with the experienced but impulsive Carl Bernstein (Hoffman). Early scenes where Redford and Hoffman meet are so well-written and well-played, you immediately sense the actors really liked working together, in spite of their divergent styles. As Woodward and Bernstein realize they're onto a career-making, ball-busting, foundation-shattering story, the two reporters start working on the same wavelength.

Redford and Hoffman frequently speak over each other's lines and complete each other's sentences, really showing the enthusiasm felt by journalists when they're covering (and uncovering) something seismic. Redford and Hoffman are surrounded by other fine players: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Jack Warden and Martin Balsam as essential editors, Jane Alexander as a vital source, and Hal Holbrook as "Deep Throat," the deep-background source who tells Redford to "Follow the money." The question "Who is Deep Throat?" was a mystery for many years, but was eventually revealed to be FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt. There's even a scene with Ned Beatty, which has an interesting link to another media-related movie from 1976, Network -- which put him in one movie that elevated the power of print media and another that decried the corrosive influence of broadcast television.

Cinematically, All the President's Men kicks wide-screen butt. You'd think a movie about people taking notes and making phone calls would be dull as a stack of manila folders, but its attention to detail is mesmerizing. Pakula et. al. recreated the Washington Post newsroom, with its vanishing-point squares of fluorescent light and its ugly desks topped with messy papers; then contrasted them with the spooky darkness of a late-night parking garage where Redford meets "Deep Throat." It's light and dark: glaring truth versus fearful ignorance. For many years I'd only seen the movie on grainy video, where it looks pretty bland; but on a well-restored widescreen copy you get to see Gordon Willis's excellent use of lighting and deep focus, where multiple things are happening in the foreground and background.

I imagine the authentic approach taken by David Fincher's Zodiac, with its many scenes of the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom, was inspired All the President's Men. In both movies you also get a sense of how utterly analog the world was then, and how every act of information-gathering and communication was so physical -- and often involved so much walking, and traveling.

Almost anyone trying to explain the ins and outs of the Watergate scandal can just say "Watch All the President's Men" and have half their work done for them. Same with anyone trying to justify the importance of the Fourth Estate in a democratic society. Without reporters like the ones in this movie, how would anybody in the public know when our leaders are corrupt? How would anybody ever be held accountable?

To an alarming extent, All the President's Men has become extra-relevant in the past few years. People's trust in the government was trashed. The corruption of the executive branch was laid bare and eventually, Nixon had to resign. But watch the movie now and the scandal seems quaint compared to what we're living through in 2025. What shocked the public in 1972-1974 would be a passing headline today, and that's only if it ever made it a headline. Investigative reporting, and the healthy competition that led bustling city newspapers to try to out-scoop each other, has become grimly anemic.

Even The Washington Post has taken a bad turn, with Jeff Bezos taking ownership of the paper and gutting its editorial independence. The opinion section, once a venue for telilng truth to power, has been overtaken by jerking-off-to-Ayn-Rand-photo types who think the op-ed section should exist only to laud the virtues of the free market. The paper took on the motto of "Democracy dies in darkness" and then made darkness its mission. Whereas editors once protected high government sources like "Deep Throat," the paper's mission under Bezos is to give an actual "deep throat" service to the executive branch.

I'm speaking theoretically only -- but Bezos and anyone else who undermines a newspaper's journalistic mission should be strapped down, with eyelids clamped open ala Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and forced to watch All the President's Men. Then they should be forced to watch Steven Spielberg's similarly inspiring and thrillingly well-acted The Post (2017), an adjacent movie (covering the Washington Post's publication of the Pentagon Papers) which has the added benefit of highlighting not only the gutsy stewardship of editor Ben Bradlee, but the courageous decisions of the paper's then-owner Katharine Graham.

Conclusion: All the President's Men is Robert Redford's best movie. A must-see.

After the high achievement of All the President's Men, it feels like Redford may have stepped back from the power-player mode a bit, back to actor-for-hire status. But what do I know? I haven't seen A Bridge Too Far or Brubaker, and I saw The Electric Horseman so long ago -- okay, when it was in theaters, so very long ago -- that I don't remember much.

A Bridge Too Far is an epic WWII movie that was poorly received. Its main storyline seems to involve post-Normandy battles in which British and German forces fought for control of important bridges. Apparently one of those bridges was just too, too far, jolly good, and Bob's your uncle.

Speaking of Bob, Robert Redford has a small role (we're talking Where's Redfordo? small) in the movie alongside a bazillion big names like James Caan, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, and somewhere in there is a female role for Liv Ullman. The movie was directed by Richard Attenborough, a few years from making Gandhi and beating out E.T. at this Oscars, which Steven Spielberg paid back by making a far better bridge-related WWII film, Saving Private Ryan, while letting Richard Attenborough have some fun as the "spared no expense" guy in Jurassic Park.

Anyway, Robert Redford was far more prominent in The Electric Horseman. How prominent? Well, there's a scene with lightbulbs all over his cowboy suit. I recall enjoying the movie even though my main memory is of Robert Redford looked like a Christmas tree riding a horse. Redford re-teams with Sydney Pollack (their fourth collaboration, I think) and Jane Fonda, and the story involves a former rodeo star who saves a horse after he realizes it's being abused. It would seem to pre-figure a film he directed, The Horse Whisperer. The man loved horses, and loathed abuse.

Redford's loathing of abuse informed Brubaker as well -- in this case abuse against prison inmates. The story is based on a 1967 scandal involving Arkansas farms that used prisoners as forced labor, and enforced their subservience by beating, torturing, and sexually assaulting them. Redford plays the title character, who tries to fight the system. Evidently it was a successful film, but Roger Ebert's review says the message is strong but the characterizations are weak.

Should you see them?: Perhaps. Surprisingly (due to having the oddest title), The Electric Horseman seems like the best of the three.

After spending years repeatedly working closely with directors such as Sydney Pollack and George Roy Hill, Redford decided to take a swing at it, and hit it out of the park -- a "natural," one might say... (See also The Natural, his 1984 starring role.)

Robert Redford did not act in the film, going all-in as just director. But he obviously made the most of his fine-tuned understanding, leading his cast to give concentrated, nuanced, carefully composed performances.

The story is about an upper-middle-class family in suburban Chicago who are recovering from the trauma of a boating accident that killed the eldest of two sons. The other son, played by Timothy Hutton, was recently released from a psychiatric facility after a suicide attempt. Everybody's trying to get back to normal, hiding deep undercurrents of depression and dysfunction. The story focuses on key, revealing moments between people.

Ordinary People won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director. I had never seen a movie that dealt so directly with the feelings that lead a person to suicide. There's a scene at a diner where Timothy Hutton describes (to his girlfriend, Elizabeth McGovern) how he feels, and it's presented in an unadorned, honest way that acknowledged an emotional reality in a way few other films do.

Another scene, between Hutton and Dinah Manoff, shows two people in different stages of recovery, with Hutton still unsettled and experiencing PTSD, while his friend seems to have bounced back completely -- though it turns out she is in a dangerous form of denial. Their scene together is so simple but there's something heartbreaking in the awkward space between them.

Hutton's mother and father are played by Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland. The casting of Moore was a daring choice: She had been so ebullient on TV shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show and her self-titled sitcom. It was a shock to see her as a kind of anal-retentive, icy mom who keeps up appearances but can barely mask how much she resents her surviving son. The movie slowly, heartbreaking reveals that much of the son's depression comes from a nagging suspicion that his mother doesn't really love him, a theme the movie pieces together delicately. Though there's an occasional outburst like a Christmas photo pose where Hutton shouts "Just take the damned picture!" after his mom seems to be going out of her way to avoid standing next to him.

Looking back, it feels like a lot of the scenes in Ordinary People inspired other movies. A series of therapy sessions (with the cigarette-smoking therapist played by Judd Hirsch, another TV alumnus) probably inspired Good Will Hunting (1997) to some extent. A similarly muted tone, surrounding a broken family going through the motions, can be found in American Beauty (1999) -- though that movie added more dreamlike layers. The soul-piercing pain of withheld parental love was a key element of Stand By Me (1986). Even The Sixth Sense (1999), with its interlude about the Munchausen-by-Proxy mother, feels like it owed a debt to Ordinary People's final confrontation.

That scene, in which Sutherland talks to Moore about her inability to love, also felt like it was echoing the William Holden / Faye Dunaway speech toward the end of Network (1976). Redford made the most of his influences, and in turn became a major influence to others.

A lot of baseball fans will list The Natural as a favorite, but I haven't seen it -- I'm more a Bad News Bears type. Roger Ebert called The Natural a case of "idolatry" of Robert Redford, though a lot of other critics loved it (including Gene Siskel), and James Berardinelli called it "arguably the best baseball movie ever made." So there's bat... er, I mean, there's that.

The synopsis is a bit weird, but it's based on a true story about an up-and-coming "natural" in the late1940s, Eddie Waitkus. He played for the Cubs and Phillies and was on his way to being a baseball star until an obsessed fan, in one of the earliest known cases of celebrity stalking, shot him in the chest. Waitkus recovered enough to keep playing, but not at his original level. The author Bernard Malamud based a 1952 novel on Waitkus but integrated dramatic stories from other baseball players' lives. The Barry Levinson film further adapts the novel to fit Robert Redford's age and persona. Apparently it was good enough that Glenn Close, who plays Redford's love interest, was nominated for an Oscar. (When has Close ever not ended up nominated for a performance?)

Out of Africa is one of those epic romance films that they rarely make anymore, where a person's entire bittersweet lovelife is blended into a long series of historical upheavals and localized tragedies. The main star is Meryl Streep, playing Karen Blixen from a 1937 Isak Dinesen novel about a Danish aristocrat who moves to British East Africa to run a coffee farm. Who can't relate to that? She sets up a school for the local Nairobi people, gets them medicine, and then contracts syphillis from her philandering husband. Meanwhile, another man, a big-game hunter played by Robert Redford, keeps showing up and giving her rides in his biplane. And lots of other stuff happens where the soapy feelings of the two colonialist whites are center stage, the local Kikuyu and colonial history is the backdrop, and everything's set to a lushly turgid John Barry score that makes it feel like a teary-eyed James Bond is about to pop out of a bush and ask for a martini.

This was one of Robert Redford's final collaborations with director Sydney Pollack, along with 1990's Havana. Though the latter was poorly received, the movies proved that the two greatly enjoyed working together. (Pollack, like Redford, swapped acting and directing roles frequently, and is particularly memorable acting opposite Tom Cruise in Stanely Kubrick's 1999 Eyes Wide Shut.)

Directed by Ivan "Ghostbusters" Reitman, Legal Eagles is as good as a movie with a cute rhyming title tends to be, which is to say, not that good. But Redford gave it the old lawschool try, and at least the movie wasn't titled Jurisprudent Peregrine Falcons or something.

The movie targeted so many genres -- detective crime, courtroom drama, romance, comedy -- that it missed everything and hypnotically flatulated around like when you release an untied balloon. The movie's poster, with a smiling, sweater-clad Redford handsomely lounging astride his co-stars, indicates the movie's dated hokiness. Nonetheless the cast are uniformly charming.

Robert Redford and Debra Winger are lawyers investigating a case involving a valuable stolen painting sought by a New York City performance artist (played by Daryl Hannah). A few things stand out to me about Legal Eagles:

• Legal Eagles makes a solid case study for why Roger Ebert was one of the most revered movie critics of his era. I rented it, noticed several problems with the movie, then read Ebert's summary on his legacy website -- and his 2 1/2 star (out of 4) take was spot-on. The review cuts right to the chase, bam bam bam, clearly laying out everything wrong with the film without being mean about it.
• The film continued the odd trend where Redford, known for his sex-symbol status, plays a ends up in bed with a female character even when it makes no sense in story terms. (See also: Three Days of the Condor). What kind of "eagle" attorney sleeps with a suspect (the 24-years-younger Daryl Hannah) minutes after she shows up at his apartment late at night? Even the worst lawyer in Manhattan would know to keep it in his pants (unless he was a disgraced political figure whose name rhymed with "pulley brawny").
• Legal Eagles was one of the first major Hollywood movies to depict the 1980s' rise in avant-garde performance art, and of course it both watered and dumbed it down. (Martin Scorsese's entry in 1989's New York Stories comes a lot closer to a fair depiction.) Daryl Hannah's spoken-word, catharsis-by-fire act would require her to be an expert in pyrotechnics, and probably would violate a lot of museum safety codes. (For a corrective, see Laurie Anderson's groundbreaking Home of the Brave performance-art film, also from 1986.)
• Legal Eagles features a typically distinguished performance by Terence Stamp, another legend, who died less than a month before to Redford. Keeping with the movie's rhyming convention, Stamp's villain in Legal Eagles is a cultured vulture.

I have yet to see this Redford-directed film, but a lot of people have recommended it over the years. The story, set in Milagro, New Mexico, reflected Redford's growing appreciation of, and desire to celebrate, the many cultures and heritages in the American Southwest. It was also an ambitious film for a relatively inexperienced director, given its attempt to tell a sprawling, ensemble-based comedy drama tinged with magical realism. (Few films have successfully translated that Latin American literary mode, with perhaps the most successful being 1992's Like Water for Chocolate.)

It's fitting that a movie titled "Sneakers" showcases Redford in a looser, more casual acting style, as part of an ensemble cast in a story about a team of tech-security experts hired to use hacker tricks to obtain a code-breaking device that's a sort of reverse Enigma Machine.

Sneakers was written by the same screenwriters behind WarGames (1983), and it's one of the few films about hacking that gets at least some of the details right, as compared to the gobbledygook technoslop of TV shows like NCIS, where programmers can break into systems by banging away at a computer for 30 seconds. Or in Swordfish (2001), where Hugh Jackman has to prove his mettle by breaching a system while being fellated.

Sneakers isn't that tacky, though it has its dorky moments. The assembled team includes a former CIA operative (Sidney Poiter), a conspiracy theorist (Dan Aykroyd), a young hacking prodigy (River Phoenix), and a blind man who "phreaks" systems by whistling (David Strathairn).

The movie's hacking scenarios demonstrate the age-old rule: the weakest link in any security chain is human gullibility. At one point Mary McDonnell (an ex-girlfriend of Redford's character) has to steal a password by romantically honey-trapping a supergoober played by the always-fun (if slightly freaky) Stephen Tobolowsky, and tricking him into saying a variety of phrases that can be edited together to get past a voiceprint identification system.

The cast also includes Ben Kingsley in a villain role that's considerably less alarming than the baddie he'd later play in Sexy Beast (2000), and a cameo from James Earl Jones that is such a winning, welcome surprise, this site's writer Andrew Plato includes it among the actor's best movies.

Though the story's plot is mostly just people chasing a MacGuffin, with Redford as ringleader, the movie is a cybersecurity favorite -- though it probably would lose a vote to Hackers (1995), which has the advantage of Angelina Jolie in risque hackerwear.

By 1993, Robert Redford had achieved "whatever" status, where his reputation was so fortified there wasn't much that could damage it. That's my theory for why he appeared in Indecent Proposal, the story of a super-rich man who pays a married couple $1 million for the privilege of sleeping with the wife. I guess that's the ultimate case of having "fuck you money."

Adrian Lyne, recently of Fatal Attraction and Jacob's Ladder fame, directed this crude love triangle in which architect Woody Harrelson agrees that Redford can have one night of sex with Demi Moore in exchange for enough cash to renovate his beachside Santa Monica dream house and have enough left over for a lifetime of cuckold therapy. That's not quite how it works out, though: After Redford whisks Moore away in his helicopter, Harrelson changes his mind and runs around Las Vegas seeing hotel fountains spouting as if King Kong himself were climaxing mockingly.

The architect subplot has a hint of Ayn Rand's "individualists-unite!" manifesto  The Fountainhead, with Harrelson eventually representing a force of creativity, as contrasted against Redford's grand manipulator who only really knows how to take things away for his own purposes. "Even a brick wants to be something," Harrelson says to his students, who are left to meditate on the concept of sentient bricks. It's hard to take the characters too seriously, given their foolish inability to understand basic gambling odds or make sure their house has proper financing.

Redford's character seems like an intentionally perverse revisitation of his Jay Gatsby role, as he spends much of the movie wistfully longing for a woman he can't have, even when he has her. The whole movie is bonkers, but the three stars emerged unscathed, and "Would you sleep with Robert Redford for a million dollars?" made a great ice-breaker during the Sundance Film Festival.

Quiz Show is arguably the most underrated, and best-directed, film in Robert Redford's career. The movie is a case study in corruption, based on the real-life cheating scandal of Twenty-One game show. In 1958, the trivia competition's ratings were flagging because the champion, Herb Stempel (John Turturro), was a dull presence. The show's producers saw a possible ratings star in the younger and more handsome Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), and wanted to feed him correct answers so he could win. Doren sheepishly refuses, but at a key moment they feed him a question they'd asked during a test screening, and this on-the-spot nudge pushes him across the thin line of immorality.

The story expands from there, with Paul Attanasio's screenplay nimbly peeling away layers of moral compromise while Redford guides the actors to give the most subtle, shaded performances imaginable. The cast is uniformly excellent, including everyone from Rob Morrow and Hank Azaria to Mira Sorvino and even Martin Scorsese. I'm always fond of the character actor David Paymer, who feels teleported in from the era. And this is one of the best things John Turturro has done, shy of his ball-licking, "nobody Fs with Jesus," Big Lebowski showstopper. On top of that, this is possibly the most fine-tuned work Ralph Fiennes has ever done, a delicate portrayal sandwiched between his evil roles in Saving Private Ryan and the Harry Potter movies.

Quiz Show wasn't a hit, and potential audiences likely wondered "Why should I care about people cheating on game shows in the 1950s?" You should see it, though: It's a great film about the ways money, status, pressure and competition can warp the equation of right and wrong. People trying to succeed will always be tempted to take short-cuts. Persuaders will use empty promises to get their way. Under scrutiny for wrongdoing, people always have to ask: "Do I dig in my heels, or come clean? Do I deny that the wrongdoing was wrong -- and find ways justify it?" These questions are always relevant.

Redford knew this, and directed with the same kind of gravity found in All the President's Men. The consequences weren't on the same tier: The quiz-show scandals led to Congressional hearings and important broadcasting laws, but they didn't bring down a presidency. What they did do is highlight that no, it's not okay for mass media to deceive its audience. Even on a trivial quiz show. As a result, shows like Jeopardy! now double-check answers and change scores with the diligence of lawyers. Unfortunately, many audiences don't demand the same accountabilty of their news programs.

The Horse Whisperer is the kind of folksy, human drama that people like me avoided in 1998, favoring unusual indie-style films. But those who have settled in for this story of an empathetic horse trainer, who helps a traumatized horse get back on the, uh, saddle, seem to reallly like it. Redford is the "horse whisperer," and his efforts also help a troubled teenager, played by Scarlett Johansson, with the teen and the horse's fates emotionally/spirtually linked. I think that's the jist. Redford, himself an afficionado of horses and ranch culture (his character is from Montana), also directed. One imagines Redford's actor/director success inspired Kevin Costner, though perhaps not strongly enough to save us from The Postman (1997).

I'm grouping The Horse Whisperer alongside The Legend of Bagger Vance because where the former movie put "The (blank) Whisperer" into the common lexicon ("the cat whisperer," "the jealous girlfriend whisperer," etc.), Bagger Vance gave us something more problematic: "The Magical Negro."

The Legend of Bagger Vance is about a Depression Era golfer (Matt Damon) who regains his mojo after a mysterious caddy (Will Smith) shows up, dispensing both pitching wedges and inspirational wisdom. Damon is eventually able to get back his "authentic swing" and score a hole-in-one on the putting grass of Charlize Theron, I guess, though I haven't seen the film.

Director Spike Lee saw it, though, and found Will Smith's role so patronizing that he coined the term "magical negro" to describe it. Lee noted that Hollywood had established a trend of putting black men in desexualized, unthreatening roles that emphasized their helpfulness to white people. (Other examples of that era include Driving Miss Daisy, and particularly The Green Mile, in which the "magic negro" really is magic.)

On the plus side, The Legend of Bagger Vance gave us another reason to laugh during Adam Sandler's Happy Gilmore (1996), which contains one of the great still images in golf comedy: the "magical negro" Carl Weathers as a heavenly apparition alongside Abraham Lincoln and an alligator. Though Happy Gilmore preceded the Bagger Vance movie by four years, perhaps it was satirizing its source, Steven Pressfield's 1995 novel.

A River Runs Through It, directed by Redford, was an early role for Brad Pitt. A lot of people love the movie for its decades-spanning tale of Montana brothers (Pitt, along with Craig Sheffer) whose family tradition included fly-fishing with their Presbyterian father (Tom Skerritt). Apparently the film has a kind of Zen-like quality, with its river metaphor and the poetic shapes the fishing lines make as their S curves dance over the ripples. Oh yeah. I might have to take a cold shower after typing that.

Then, with Spy Game, Redford and Pitt star together as a couple of CIA operatives, with the elder Redford making moves to save his younger counterpart after he's captured during a covert operation. Tony Scott directed, and the movie did well enough, though it was more John Le Carre than Jason Bourne. (It's interesting how Spy Game parallels Gene Hackman's Enemy of the State, in that they both seem to be reprising one of their iconic early-'70s roles -- Three Days of the Condor and The Conversation, respectively -- while performing alongside up-and-comers.)

What became evident about the Pitt/Redford collaborations is that, as many people noted at the time, Pitt had a golden-boy aura similar to what Redford had a couple of decades earlier. Watching them work together is a bit like seeing Demi Moore unfurling her umbilicus bestride Margaret Qualley in The Substance. I'd like to think that Redford's early influence led Pitt to take more chances as an actor, seeking quirky parts in movies like Kalifornia, 12 Monkeys, and Fight Club instead of romantic or action-hero leads.

I'm sorry to say I haven't seen most of Robert Redford's later-career movies. Seems like there were more misses than hits, but Redford co-starred with a lot of other notables, and I'm sure these films are at least better than watching Mr. Beast promote cryptocurrency while filling houses with slime, or whatever that untoothsomely toothy twit does while flaunting his wealth.

The Clearing, about a kidnapping and ransom scheme involving a businessman, got so-so reviews, but might be worth a look for its teamup of Redford, Helen Mirren, and Willem Dafoe. I'd watch a movie of Willem Dafoe clipping his toenails and of Helen Mirren spackling.

An Unfinished Life was directed by Lasse Hallström, whose 1985 Swedish-language My Life as a Dog is one of the great films about the tapestry of childhood experience. An Unfinished Life, with its echoed title, appears to be weaving a similar kind of story, this time about an extended family that includes hunters and ranchers in Wyoming. Jennifer Lopez and Morgan Freeman also star, and the synopsis makes it sound like Redford -- often described here as "gruff" -- does both "bear whispering" and "cat whispering" at some point.

Lions for Lambs was released when the U.S. fatigued by both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and it's possible the producers misread the public's interest in a movie that underscored how bad it was all going. Or whether people wanted to see Tom Cruise in a movie that doesn't show him running furiously and leaping off mountains (instead he plays a senator). Or Meryl Streep not archly explaining the significance of cerulean (as she did the previous year in The Devil Wears Prada).

The film, which involves inept leaders (i.e. "lambs") sending young soldiers (i.e. "lions") into danger without a coherent plan, seems like it tried to link distinct realms of society -- the military, politicians, journalists, and academics -- in the manner of a John Sayles movie (City of Hope) or The Wire. And couldn't pull it off. Chicago Tribune critic Matt Pais said the movie is "more of an imitation of life than a reflection on it." It's probably worth seeing Robert Redford's scenes as a college professor though.

Heavens to Bobby, Mr. Redford stayed a busy beaver throughout the 2010s. He directed The Conspirator, about Mary Surratt, who was tied to the Abraham Lincoln assassination. He appeared (or did voice acting) in children's films such as Charlotte's Web and Pete's Dragon.

In The Company You Keep, Redford plays a former member of the Weather Underground who goes on the run from FBI agents after his secret is exposed. Julie Christie plays another former militant whom he seeks out to help clear his name. Susan Sarandon and Shia LaBeouf (pre-meltdown) also star, and Redford was director as well as lead. I haven't seen this film but reviews say it's more a slow-burn rumination (touching on the disappointing fate of 1960s-style radicalism) than a suspenseful thriller. It sounds like, along with Running on Empty, it would be worth a look after viewing One Battle After Another. (See the Screenopolis review of that film.)

Redford portrayed veteran broadcast-journalist Dan Rather in Truth (2015), which is about the Killian scandal that occurred when documents relating to George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard turned out to be fakes. Redford acted opposite Cate Blanchett in a film that thematically overlaps with both All the President's Men and Quiz Show. The film was well-received, has a strong supporting cast (Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Bruce Greenwood), and I'm telling the truth when I say I'd like to see it. Dan Rather himself said he felt the movie handled the events fairly.

The Discovery (2017) and Our Souls at Midnight (2017) both are at least partly in the romance genre. The Discovery, a science-fiction tale directed by Charlie McDowell (actor Malcolm McDowell's son) seems pretty out-there. Redford is a scientist who discovers the existence of an afterlife, which you'd think would be a wonderful discovery, but leads to an epidemic of suicides. This Black Mirror-esque (and darkly funny) premise inspires romantic and melodramatic conflicts between Jason Segel, Rooney Mara, Jesse Plemons, and Riley Keough.

Our Souls at Midnight sounds more classically Redfordian. (Is that a word? If not, I just coined it),. This was the fourth and final movie in which Redford co-starred alongside Jane Fonda. (Their previous films were The Chase, Barefoot in the Park, and The Electric Horseman, and the actor had a bit part in another Fonda movie, 1960's Tall Story.) They play neighbors who are both widows/widowers and lonely. Hesitantly, they start doing the non-sexual version of "Netflix and chill." I chose that term because this is a Netflix production. Complications ensue. Apparently it's a sweet little drama, and I may have to fire it up on the ol' Netflixiator contraption sometime.

Of all his later films, my vote for his best (of those I've seen) goes to All Is Lost. The story has an experimental element because Robert Redford, a man stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is the sole cast member. He has practically no dialogue, other than an occasional desperate "Help!" or exasperated "Fuck!"

They say there are only three conflicts in stories: Man versus man, man versus himself, and man versus nature. All Is Lost is a great example of the latter. Redford's unnamed character is seemingly an accomplished boatsman on a personal adventure, though it's never explained. He wakes one morning to find that a wayward shipping container has bonked into the hull of his sailboat, causing it to slowly take on water. Much worse: the radio is damaged. Redford's performance is subtle: He's just a man trying to fix things. No point in complaining. He patches and seals the gap, uses a hand-pump, and assesses how much canned food and fresh water he has left. Then a storm comes, the boat sinks -- and he has to use a lifeboat.

Redford figured out how to live on inhospitable land for Jeremiah Johnson, and in All Is Lost he takes on the vast, inhumane sea. Resourceful as an Eagle Scout, he figures out how to navigate the night sky using a sextant, condensate water to stave off dehydration, and swim underwater to determine why his inflatable is deflating. Redford's visage, seemingly weathered after decades as an outdoorsman uncommitment to sunscreen, maintains youthfulness in large part thanks to a very thick head of hair. Were his tangles real? Augmented? Who knows, and it's hard to tell even after he emerges like a wet cat. The man had either formidable follicles or hardy hairplugs, and I'm happy to accept the mystery.

All Is Lost is a great film not just for what it is, but for what it isn't: It's not horror like Open Water, and it sidesteps the slickly spiritual tone of something like Cast Away. Nonetheless it's hard not to see a movie about the progressive sinking of a boat (or boats) as metaphorical, or at least partly so. Titanic, for example, is a true story but "the hubris of man" theme undeniably overlaps. In All Is Lost, the detritus of large-scale capitalism sets a man's modest existence on a downward slope, and when he calls out to passing cargo boats there's nobody there to hear -- just more stacks of the same containers. The film could be a commentary on modern life, but it made me imagine a person's long battle with a medical ailment, or trying to get through a patch of depression. There are many ways to read it as metaphor, or one could reject that entirely and just appreciate the story directly. This is why I consider All Is Lost one of the best entries in the Redford's late career.

(A note about the film's director, J.C. Crandor. How on earth does a director go from making Margin Call, All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year, and Triple Frontier, to..... the much-maligned 2024's Kraven the Hunter? The Marvel curse in action? Solid track record overall though.)

This is the most recent Robert Redford movie I've seen, though I paused to give my ears a break from the gravel churning inside Nick Nolte's throat when he speaks. A Walk in the Woods tells a cute story about two oldsters hiking the Appalachian Trail together.

Based on a popular book by Bill Bryson, a middlebrow memoirist for those who find Calvin Trillin a bit too spicy, the movie links jocular vignettes about buddies bonding in the woods.

To those asking, "Does a Bob (Redford) defecate in the woods?" the answer is Yes! There's a running gag about the use of a trowel to bury one's scat. Or as Redford refers to it, "poop." Nothing like squeezing laughs from Redford squeezing loaves. Nolte, for his part, refuses to bury anything and brings expletive-laded anal-expulsiveness to Appalachia like an alcoholic mall Santa on a perp walk.

Redford had wanted Paul Newman as his hiking companion, to bookend the movie opposite The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Alas, during casting crunchtime, Newman hiked off of this mortal coil. Nolte was available, so Redford made do with Butch Cassidy and The Prince of Tides. It kinda works as double feature to the previous year's Wild, though I'm pretty sure that movie's Pacific Crest Trail tale lacks corresponding scenes of Reese Witherspoon burying her "poop" (with her spoon?). Opportunity lost.

A Walk in the Woods features a chipper Emma Thompson as Redford's wife, worried about the nightmare he's about to inflict on his knees. The film's standout is former Daily Show correspondent Kristen Schaal, a lone hiker who gloms on to the duo. Schaal's character criticizes their inferior gear and methods; she's literally the walking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect -- the amateur lording over the novices. Redford and Nolte ditch her by "segment hiking" the trail (what pro hikers deride as "yellow blazing"), turning the Georgia-to-Maine excursion into a chance to see America one postcard shop and moose confrontation at a time.

Though trifling, the movie restated Robert Redford's commitment to outdoorsmanship.

I'm sorry to say I haven't seen this yet. Redford had chosen this as his final film, made when he was 82. The title seems a bit on the nose, but that shouldn't stop anybody. No Country for Old Men had a similar title and that didn't stop it from being a masterwork. So I'm holding out hope for Redford's movie, which also stars Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Sissy Spacek, and Tom Waits.

The story sounds like a lot of movies in Robert Redford's career: It starts with a catchy premise, then expands into a drama about family and friendship, emotional themes such as regret and second chances, and of course a bit of horseback riding. I can imagine a Clint Eastwood movie about an aging bank robber going in an entirely different direction (probably with him grumbling something angsty), but Redford had his own, more sun-glinting way of doing things.