I’ll start by saying that I consider Gene Hackman a screen acting giant, one of the best ever in films like Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection and French Connection II, The Conversation, Night Moves, Unforgiven, and underrated movies such as Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka and Woody Allen’s Another Woman. I want to get this out of the way so I can make another point.

Reviewing Hackman’s IMDB credits: In the Eighties and Nineties, he made (like many others, alas) way too many routine thrillers. Akin to Robert De Niro and Nicolas Cage in this respect. The 21 features that Hackman made after his Oscar for Unforgiven are largely disposable except for The Royal Tenenbaums.

The IMDB is always very revealing in this respect, although I don’t know anyone who uses it that way except for me. * There just aren’t enough good projects to go around, and actors like to work, and to make good money. So you get what you get. People forget the stinkers, but there they all are in lists!

Actors could, and sometimes do, make themselves available to independent and international directors: That was Matthew McConaughey’s shrewd strategy for re-booting his career. I highly respect anyone who does that. But it is not the common route.

*This always puzzles me, that people don’t drill down into the credits more, movie, TV, radio, and theater. But I suppose that this is (1) work, and (2) possibly productive of surprises or counter-narratives, and journalists and many critics simply aren’t interested in that. They almost always want to feed the public the “conventional narrative”: It’s comfy and unchallenging.