Clint Eastwood

There are moments that define a nation. Moments that show us the kind of Americans we really are. Today, we’ve brought shame on our great nation: Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper has surpassed The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and Guardians of the Galaxy as the highest-grossing film of 2014. How did we let this happen? How did we let a robot baby with an uncanny valley where its face should be defeat Katniss Everdeen and Baby Groot? How?

Like most things these days, it all comes back to Clint Eastwood. ‘American Sniper’ reigns supreme at the box office, and the only movie that would seem to have a fighting chance of dislodging it from the top spot this weekend—the Jennifer Lopez thriller ‘The Boy Next Door’—owes its very existence to the movie that Eastwood was finishing up when he got cast as “Dirty” Harry Callahan. That’d be ‘Play Misty for Me,’ which has earned its place in cinema history as the answer to a trivia question—What was two-time Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood’s first movie as a director?—but is also one of the most influential American movies of the 1970s; the primal scene of an endlessly replenishing sub-genre of sexy stalker movies.

‘American Sniper’ had a record-shattering weekend at the box office, grossing an astounding $105 million from Friday to Monday. It’s already the second biggest earner of Clint Eastwood’s entire career after ‘Gran Torino,’ and with six Academy Award nominations (and great word-of-mouth) behind it, it’s posed to become his biggest hit ever.

I wonder if Chris Kyle was a Clint Eastwood fan. ‘American Sniper’’s marketing materials describe Kyle as “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history,” but before his military career, Kyle was a cowboy. He wore a hat and boots, and even carried a six-shooter. Eventually, he gave up the cowboy life and decided to serve his country. He was a gifted marksman and trained to be a Navy SEAL. But even as a soldier, Kyle never lost that cowboy swagger—or that sense that someone has to venture out into the frontier and protect the American way of life. That’s what Kyle learned from his father—who raised him to be a “sheepdog,” a watchful protector in a world of sheep and wolves—and from watching violent Westerns like the ones that made Eastwood a major Hollywood star.

What is the greatest movie car chase of all time? Type the phrase “best car chases” into Google and you’ll get page upon page of lists ranking, debating, and considering that question. The “best” of anything in cinema is subjective, and open to interpretation. But no matter what list you read or which critic you trust, a few contenders pop up over and over again: ‘Bullitt,’ ‘The French Connection,’ ‘Ronin.’ And rightfully so; those movies all contain incredible car chases.

Just yesterday we saw the first images from Clint Eastwood's 'American Sniper,' revealing Bradley Cooper as Navy SEAL and prominent sniper Chris Kyle, and right on the heels of our first look comes the first official trailer for the action drama. From the looks of it, it seems like Cooper will definitely be picking up some nominations come awards season.

We're getting not one, but two new Clint Eastwood films this year, and today brings your first look at 'American Sniper,' something vastly different from 'Jersey Boys,' we assure you. It's been a bit of a passion project for star Bradley Cooper, and you can see a scruffed-up version of the normally clean-cut leading man in these new photos, which gives us our first glimpse at the awards season drama.

Over the past 12 years, with the help of his trusty director of photography, Tom Stern, Clint Eastwood helmed 11 films, a vast and rich filmography of features that spans time (from the late '20s to the contemporary era and just about everything in between), place (from Los Angeles to Iwo Jima, from South Africa to the Indian Ocean) and theme (hard-bitten historical bits to jazzy musicals). So why does every single one of those 11 pictures look exactly the same?

Clint Eastwood (‘Any Which Way You Can’; ‘Firefox’) is back in the director’s chair for this week’s new release, ‘Jersey Boys,’ a biopic for the legendary Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Will ‘Jersey Boys’ have you dancing up and down the aisles? Will ‘Jersey Boys’ inspire you to finally start that doo-wop group you’ve been planning for years? As a service to you, we answer every question that you could possibly have about ‘Jersey Boys.’

The trailer for Clint Eastwood's 'Jersey Boys' showcases one of the Oscar-winning actor's strangest choices of material in a long time. Sure, we expect Clint to make Westerns and Oscar pictures, but a full-blown musical? This could get interesting.