Top 5 Eastwood movies

As "Sully" lands in theaters, it's a great time to review Clint Eastwood's finest work.

1. "Unforgiven" (1992)

Eastwood held on to screenwriter David Webb Peoples' revisionist western until the time was right, and the result was an Oscar-bestowed turning point. Evocatively, suspensefully detailing a desperate widower's reckoning with his savage past, it tracked powerfully as both a pungent deflating of violent western myths and a scarily tense depiction of how, as Eastwood's killer tells a scared young man, "We all have it comin', kid."

2. "Million Dollar Baby" (2004)

A poor young female boxer (Hilary Swank) wants to fight. The trainer (Eastwood) reluctantly trains. Punches await, small and huge. An unabashedly rich-in-feeling movie about toughness, sacrifice and life on one's own terms.

3. "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (1976)

Marked by Bruce Surtees' exquisite cinematography, Eastwood's post-Civil War vengeance saga — in which a Missouri farmer (Eastwood) turns hunted renegade after Union soldiers slaughter his family — becomes a sly episodic western about the hard, bloody road to peace.

After "Flags of Our Fathers," Eastwood explored the same battle from the Japanese perspective, and — to many people's surprise — in the Japanese language. The result is a potently human, unflinching and deeply felt evocation of how battle is fury, but war is a shroud asphyxiating the soul.

5. "Bronco Billy" (1980)

Eastwood's foray into old-fashioned screwball comedy is really his first attempt at tweaking his tough-guy image, and it's his sleeper masterpiece. Turning a ramshackle Wild West show into a warmly funny vision of a be-who-you-want-to-be America, Eastwood serves up a conservative's vision of the country that's inclusive, patriotic and able to laugh at itself.