A world-weary cowboy attempts to find redemption by teaching a boy what it means to be a good man.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 19, 2024

Nobody has turned getting old into a project like Eastwood has, the weariness deepening while the swagger fades like a mirage, leaving him frailer, more exposed and more recognisably human. But still Clint, still the myth.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 30, 2021

There's something touching about seeing the 91-year-old Eastwood in such a reflective mood.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 13, 2021

Terribly dated, messy and more than a little rough around the edges.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 12, 2021

Clint Eastwood's best movies have an elegiac quality - they are the films of an older man, full of regrets - and this latest effort from the 91-year-old screen icon is elegiac squared.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2021

The film's presence in 21st century cinemas is a marvel. It is like turning up at the ferry port to find yourself ushered on to a tea clipper. A rickety tea clipper.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2021

This Tex-Mex drama about a retired rodeo star on a mercy mission has an intermittent dawdling charm. It's also slack and featherbrained - and set in the late 1970s, but you can barely tell.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2021

Despite the casual air, nothing in Cry Macho is un-self aware. And Eastwood the film-maker is never more knowing than when dealing with Eastwood the star.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 10, 2021

It's a Swiss cheese of bizarre plot-holes set in 1979, clearly because that is when it was conceived.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2021

Eastwood's back with a look at manliness filtered through the wisdom of aging. It makes the odd stultifying stop and falls into several cliché potholes, yet Cry Macho ultimately finds its way.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 9, 2021

Cry Macho finds its way ... turning into a fine drama that caters to Eastwood's strengths as an actor, director, and icon.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 11, 2021

If the film's not Unforgiven, the fact that Eastwood's not stressing too hard and still adventurous is a virtue.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 24, 2021

There's an unexpected benefit to [Eastwood's] frailty, and it makes this leisurely, not especially plausible film worth watching.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 24, 2021

An amiable road picture that never strays from its connect-the-dots predictability. But it does boast the best rooster you'll likely see in any 2021 movie.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 23, 2021

But the worst dialogue is given to an unfathomable love interest, portrayed by Natalia Traven, playing a feisty widow... It's all pretty awkward. When the couple dance it looks as if she's holding up a frail Eastwood in case he falls.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 23, 2021

The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 21, 2021

To say that he's making movies for the fans and not the critics would be inaccurate twice over, both because many of his fans are critics, and because he's only ever made them for himself.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 21, 2021

As a director, Eastwood keeps his tone almost primordially simple; not for Macho are the murky moral calculations and defined character arcs of The Unforgiven, American Sniper, or even Gran Torino.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 18, 2021

It's the sentimentality that makes the movie work; Eastwood has never shied from making a male weepie, and less so from rending the fact of his own age into a dramatic problem.

| Sep 18, 2021

It's great to see Eastwood (and his stunt double) back in the saddle in a few scenes in which he breaks some wild mustangs and teaches Rafael how to ride, but Cry Macho has us crying uncle long before the underwhelming conclusion.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 17, 2021