Clint Eastwood Movie:

Editorial Review:
Not enough people went to see True Crime in theaters. Wasn't Clint Eastwood too old to be playing a guy whom a variety of glorious women, from the middle-aged Diane Venora and Laila Robins to the young Mary McCormack and Lucy Liu, find attractive? Could the onetime Man with No Name credibly play a brilliant crime reporter, Steve Everett, with an ironic turn of phrase and an incurable habit of screwing up both his personal and professional lives? The respective answers to those questions are: hell no and hell yes. True Crime features one of Eastwood's best and most entertaining performances--and his work as director is utterly assured.

The story (from Andrew Klavan's bestselling novel) gives Everett the last-minute assignment of interviewing a condemned man (Isaiah Washington) on the eve of his execution. The prisoner, a born-again Christian and exemplary family man, has everything the reporter lacks except a shot at seeing the next sunrise. Everett sets out to get him that, yet far from making a beeline to the exculpatory evidence that will save the life of his "client," this very tarnished hero has to spend a lot of the next 24 hours contending with the baggage he's accumulated through drinking, wenching, and familial neglect. (A Pirandellian note: Everett's daughter is played by Eastwood's own daughter, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood, and her mother, Frances Fisher, returns for a feisty cameo as a prosecutor.)

This is a good one that got away. Don't let it happen again. -- Richard T. Jameson

True Crime [Blu-ray] Reviews:
A masterpiece.....
2009-09-23 - True Crime is one of the Eastwood greats, one of the best. Exceptional acting on the parts of both Clint Eastwood and Isaiah Washington. This movie should really be on your collection list for Eastwood and Washington movies.

The story line of this film is typical of the clever way that Eastwood keeps one on the edge of your seat, until the very last minute.

It Happened in Oaktown
2009-04-08 - We turned on True Crime as part of a project to watch all the films of screenwriter Larry Gross, and this one turned out to be a gem. Primarily a showcase for Clint Eastwood, the film has a hypnotic power that sees us through some rocky shoals. Mostly, the director has a problem with his star actor--he's too old to play the part, and at first it's disconcerting to see him canoodling in a quiet Oakland bar with a fellow reporter Mary McCormick. The film says she's 23 (though I must say she looks older), but he must be 70 and we start doing all kinds of subtraction in our head. At heart the movie is a study of a man falling apart, losing everything the good old fashioned Richard Yates way, and the conceit of the movie is that it all takes place within that Aristotelian framework of 24 hours (plus a little epilogue that must take place several months after the main course of the plot, for it's Christmastime, and Clint is Santa).

Oakland never looked so good or so bad, and I doubt that Eastwood ever assembled a better cast of actors all the way around. Isaiah Washington and Lisa Gay Hamilton are both magical in parts that fall outside their usual acting range--here they're Christians struggling through his final hours on Death Row, with Michael McKean as an officious chaplain. In the outside world Clint is cheating, smoking up a storm, cuckolding his boss, fooling women who see through him. Chief among them is Diane Venora as his long -suffering wife. Once again Venora proves that she has the dark acting chops that should have landed her starring parts in every Cassavetes movie ever made: she actually looks as if her suffering is not going to be wiped off when the camera's aren't rolling. I think she must still be crying somewhere, helplessly, over Clint's roving eye. That Venora hasn't the Oscar nods of, say, Meryl Streep, is the real "true crime" here


True Crime
2008-10-31 - I have never been a Clint Eastwood fan, neither disliking him or liking him, however, this movie was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. I thought it was well written, well acted and I really liked the ending. It might've been "predictable" to some but I wasn't sure how it would turn out. I thought it had a great storyline and wasn't at all predictable. (You figure it will be a 50/50 chance of how it ends and if THAT makes it predictable, then I suppose it was). It's a good, interesting movie with a good ending. Plain and simple.

True Crime
2007-09-19 - Fantastic. I just love all of Clint Eastwood's movies. This is a definite keeper. Would recommend purchasing it to anyone.

Horrific
2007-05-13 - Ahhh.... just what the world needs: another mindless, pointlessly violent movie filled with gushing blood and bloodthirsty gangsters that do all sorts of things that are against the law, such as stealing and killing to name a couple. To top off it all off, you get to watch Clint Eastwood as his character tries to rescue an innocent man from the death penalty via electrocution. If you like Clint Eastwood, then might I suggest "Million Dollar Baby"? It's no masterpiece, but it's far more interesting and entertaining than this junk.