It sees the actor-director play a one-time rodeo star sent on a mission.
93-year-old Clint Eastwood is currently making the movie Juror No. 2 which, according to reports, is set to be the last film that he directs.
As such, this makes Cry Macho – Eastwood’s 2021 movie which he directed and starred in – his final entry in the genre that made him famous: the Western.
Made nearly 60 years after the Hollywood legend broke onto screens with Sergio Leone’s the Dollars Trilogy, Cry Macho is a neo-Western drama based on the novel of the same name by N. Richard Nash.
Set in the late ’70s, it sees Eastwood play Mike Milo, a one-time rodeo star and washed-up horse breeder who takes a job from an ex-boss (Dwight Yoakam) to bring the man’s young son (Eduardo Minett) home from Mexico.
“Forced to take the backroads on their way to Texas, the unlikely pair faces an unexpectedly challenging journey, during which the world-weary horseman finds unexpected connections and his own sense of redemption,” the plot synopsis reads.
Clint Eastwood’s final Western has just been added to Prime Video
Released amid the Covid pandemic but now available to stream in Ireland and the UK on Prime Video, Cry Macho received mixed reviews from critics, though many praised the movie for its emotional and melancholic tone, its Western elements, as well as for how it fits into Eastwood’s filmography as a whole.
Here’s a sample of some positive reviews of the movie:
The Atlantic: “Yet another unpretentious, melancholy farewell from a director and actor who has been supposedly retiring from the screen for the past 30 years.”
Slant Magazine: “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.”
The Age (Australia): “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.”
Times (UK): “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.”