t some point in the past five years, I detected a shift in how Clint Eastwood was being discussed by both mainstream critics and my curated Twitter/Letterboxd feeds. Well after the run of late-’90s/early-’00s potboilers (, 1999; , 2000; , 2002) that continued to position him as a present-tense star, as well as the two slices of Oscar bait (, 2003; , 2004) that reinvented him as a perennial awards-season player, his two self-conscious “farewells” to his star persona (, 2008; , 2012), and even the one-two punch of politically ambiguous blockbusters (, 2014; , 2016) that reaffirmed him as a box-office titan, announcements of new Eastwood films—events which still felt commonplace and unremarkable in the mid-2010s—were now being
