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Fans of the legendary Clint Eastwood are in for a treat next month when three of his most iconic movies arrive on 4K Ultra HD and Digital for the first time. The releases mark the 54-year partnership between the multi-time Academy Award-winning veteran filmmaker and Warner Bros.

Eastwood's Dirty Harry,The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Riderwill be released on 4K Ultra HD and Digital on April 29.Directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, and Dean Riesner, based on a story by the Finks, the fan-favorite Dirty Harry debuted in 1971, starring Eastwood as the titular detective Harry Callahan, who is assigned to pay extortion money to a serial murderer. "The payoff goes wrong. Now, with the life of a 14-year-old girl at stake, Callahan refuses to allow anything--including the law--to keep him from stopping the killer."

April'sDirty Harry4K Uhd contains special features,...

The great filmmaker Clint Eastwood turns 95 this year, and while he's spry and intelligent, it's hard to imagine anyone making many more films at that age. Fortunately, some of his earlier masterpieces are getting new 4K remasters and being released in immaculate form. Celebrating more than 50 years of his partnership with Warner Bros., which began in 1971 with the release of Dirty Harry, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is releasing three of Eastwood's best films in 4K Uhd with meticulous special features. The four-time Academy Award winner looks better than ever in these new releases of Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Rider. Learn more about the releases and their epic special features below. They'll be released on April 29.

'Dirty Harry' (1971)

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Dirty HarryRActionCrimeThrillerRelease DateDecember 23, 1971Runtime102 minutesDirectorDon SiegelCastSee All...

You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?

You should, because Dirty Harry is coming to 4K Ultra HD + Digital in standard and limited edition SteelBook packaging on April 29 from Warner Bros.

Inspired by the true crimes of the Zodiac Killer, the 1971 action-thriller classic has been newly restored in 4K with Hdr and Dolby Atmos TrueHD sound.

Over four hours of special features are included:

Audio Commentary by Film Historian Richard Schickel Generations and Dirty Harry (new) Lensing Justice: The Cinematography of Dirty Harry (new) Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows Clint Eastwood: The Man from Malpaso Clint Eastwood: A Cinematic Legacy – Fighting for Justice Interview Gallery: Patricia Clarkson, Joel Cox, Clint Eastwood, Hal Holbrook, Evan Kim, John Milius, Ted Post, Andy Robinson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Urich Dirty Harry’s Way Dirty Harry: The Original

Dirty Harry is the first...

John Wayne won his first and only Academy Award for his memorable performance as cantankerous lawman Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. The 1969 Western marked Wayne’s last triumph within the genre, which he had virtually dominated since his star-making role in the 1939 Western film Stagecoach.

In the early 1970s, Wayne’s box-office standing was being threatened by the advance of a younger generation of Hollywood leading men, led by Clint Eastwood, whose rise to superstardom coincided with Wayne’s commercial decline. Wayne hastened this transition by turning down the titular starring role in the 1971 action thriller film Dirty Harry, which enabled Eastwood to transcend the international stardom he’d gained from Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy film series and become Hollywood’s foremost action star.

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Dirty HarryRActionCrimeThrillerRelease DateDecember 23, 1971Runtime102 minutesDirectorDon SiegelCastSee...

Clint Eastwood, ever heard of him? Of course you have … though maybe not around these parts. Whether he’s on screen, behind the camera, or, hell, even both, the two-time Oscar winner is best known for grounded dramas, cutting-edge westerns, crime thrillers, left-of-the-dial comedies, biopics, and the list goes on. But Horror? Short of his bit parts in The Witches and Revenge of the Creature, you’d have to bend the tenets of the genre to make it work.

The most malleable of his films to the Horror genre is his directorial debut: 1971’s Play Misty for Me. Written by Jo Heims and Dean Riesner, the taut thriller pre-dates the “-from hell” subgenre (think: Fatal Attraction) by nearly two decades. It’s also a better movie than most of them. Eastwood not only proves to be the lean and mean director we know and respect today from the get-go, but...

American lawman Wyatt Earp has become a legendary Western folk hero in film, television, and literature. Throughout the 1870s, Earp worked as a lawman in various cities such as Wichita, Dodge City, and Deadwood. In 1879, Earp moved to Tombstone, where he soon became involved in a conflict with a group of outlaws known as the Cochise County Cowboys. The conflict climaxed with the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which saw Earp, his brothers Morgan and Virgil, and Doc Holliday face off against five members of the Cochise County Cowboys.

Due in part to Earp's exaggerations about his life and the fictitious nature of Stuart N. Lake's best-selling biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, the truth surrounding Earp's Western exploits has faded with time. While film and television have aided in transforming Earp's life into a mythological existence rather than a factual one, they have also captured a uniquely American...

Subscribers of the streaming service Max may be feeling lucky starting November 1 as one of Clint Eastwoods best movies will debut on the streamer on that date. Dirty Harry (1971) stars Eastwood as the titular character, Harry Callahan, a no-nonsense San Fransisco city police inspector who is in search of a murderer who uses a sniper rifle to kill innocent people. The film was directed by Don Siegel and the screenplay was written by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner.

Dirty Harry has one of Eastwoods most famous lines as over his lunch break, he manages to foil an attempted bank robbery, shooting one man dead and holding another at gunpoint.

Related Clint Eastwood's A Fistful Of Dollars Remake Already Has the Perfect Star

Having recently been cast in the Dcu's Lanterns series as John Stewart, Aaron Pierre's talent shows he's capable of playing another iconic character.

Neo-noir is a relatively recent wave of cinema that brought the success and popularity of the film noir genre back into the spotlight through great movies. The 1970s saw an uptick in neo-noir projects, and the decade has come to define the inception of neo-noir. However, these films couldn't exist without the original works of the noir genre and the actors that helped to create the archetypes seen frequently onscreen. The best film noir movies of all time were primarily produced between the 1940s and 1960s, so many actors of the Hollywood Golden Age starred in these crime thrillers.

While there are still dark shadows, detectives, and horrible crimes, there's much more to the neo-noir genre. There are many underrated neo-noir movies from the 1980s, as the 1970s and '80s were the peak of the revival of film noir. It's hard to know where to begin when unpacking the neo-noir genre,...

Inspector Dave Toschi needs a night off. After years of chasing the so-called Zodiac Killer, Toschi thought he had found his man, only for his captain to shoot him down, citing insufficient evidence to make an arrest. At the movie theater later on, the picture Toschi watches with his wife doesn’t make him feel any better. It’s Dirty Harry, the 1971 movie in which Clint Eastwood‘s Inspector Harry Callahan does battle with a killer called Scorpio.

Frustrated by what he’s seeing, Toschi heads to the lobby for a smoke. As viewers shuffle out after him, one remarks, “Dave, that Harry Callahan did a hell of a job with your case.”

“Yeah, no need for due process, right?” Toschi responds sarcastically to indicate his frustration.

Or, at least that’s how it went in the movies. Specifically, the film Zodiac, written by James Vanderbilt and directed by David Fincher,...

Clint Eastwood wasn't exactly Clint Eastwood when he was prepping for his directorial debut, "Play Misty for Me," in 1971.

He was primarily viewed as a Western actor who'd parlayed his television success on CBS' "Rawhide" to attain a cultish, pulpy stardom via Sergio Leone's shot-in-Spain "Dollars Trilogy." The films were commercial hits in the United States but despised by most prominent film critics. They found them silly and excessively violent, and thought Eastwood's taciturn demeanor was less an affectation than flat-out lousy acting.

Nevertheless, Eastwood kept knocking out hits, which pleased Universal Pictures enough that they were more than happy to greenlight his first filmmaking effort. Screenwriters Jo Heims and Dean Riesner had crafted a tightly structured thriller about a ladies' man disc jockey who finds himself stalked by a one-night-stand. It was a curious choice for Eastwood in that his character is vulnerable and somewhat unlikeable. He's certainly not the steely,...

Clint Eastwood's impulse for directing goes back to his early days working on the 1959 TV series "Rawhide." As he described in an interview with Patrick McGilligam printed in the 1999 book "Clint Eastwood: Interviews," edited by Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz, he stated that working among cattle while on horseback -- "Rawhide" is about cattle ranchers who fend off bad guys in the Old West -- gave him ideas as to how shots could look better. The story goes that he wanted to take a camera onto a horse with him and film Pov shots in the middle of the bovine action. He was denied on "Rawhide," and was not permitted to direct any episodes. It seems that, in the late '50s and early '60s, actors directing their own TV shows had yet to prove lucrative for CBS.

Eastwood wouldn't direct a feature film until 1973, making his...

When The New Yorker's Pauline Kael wrote of Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry" in 1971 that the American cop thriller "has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced," she kicked off a fierce debate about the genre that still roils today.

Taken at face value, it's difficult to dispute that the film is meant to titillate viewers with the ultimate, judge-jury-executioner justice pursued and dispensed by Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan. He despises the Miranda Warning, and complains that the United States' judicial system has been corrupted to favor the rights of criminals. The screenplay, credited to Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, and Dean Riesner, stacks the deck to a ludicrous degree by having Andrew Robinson's Scorpio Killer orchestrate an act of police brutality late in the movie to get Callahan kicked off the case. At this moment, it feels like we're meant to throw our hands...

It's always interesting to see what happens when a director tries their hand at a film unlike any they've made before or since. Consider David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a whimsical romantic fantasy drama far removed tonally from the grim thrillers and dark character studies the masses are accustomed to seeing from the "Se7en" and "Social Network" helmer.

John Carpenter's "Starman" is his "Benjamin Button," at least in that respect. There are times the 1984 sci-fi film recalls the director's down-and-dirty action flicks, just as there are visuals and scenes that speak to his horror oeuvre. But for the most part, "Starman" plays out as a love story by road movie, albeit where one of the leads is a visitor from a distant planet. That would be the titular character, a cordial extra-terrestrial being who crash-lands on Earth after their spacecraft is shot down by...

Mark Harrison Feb 12, 2019

Looking for something to watch this Valentine’s Day? Here’s why John Carpenter’s sci-fi romance Starman is worth another look…

This feature contains minor spoilers for Starman. If you haven’t seen the film, please read on with caution.

John Carpenter hasn’t made too many conventional date movies. Films like Halloween, Escape From New York, and his thematic Apocalypse trilogy don’t typically get couples in the mood for love. Nevertheless, he made a doozy of a romance in the form of 1984’s Starman, which stars an Oscar-nominated Jeff Bridges and an equally great Karen Allen as an unlikely couple who take a road trip across America.

Starting with the 1977 launch of the Voyager 2 space probe, which carries a golden record full of samples of Earth culture and greetings in 57 different languages, the film is about an alien who answers mankind’s invitation to extra-terrestrial life.

It’s the loose-censored early 1970s, and screen bandits shootin’ up the American movie landscape are no longer suffering the once-mandated automatic moral retribution. Walter Matthau launched himself into the genre with this excellent Don Siegel on-the-run epic, about an old-fashioned independent bandit who accidentally rips off the mob for a million. It’s great, wicked fun.

Charley Varrick

Region B Blu-ray

Indicator

1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 111 min. / Charley Varrick the Last of the Independents; Kill Charley Varrick / Street Date January 22, 2018 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £14.99

Starring: Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, Andrew Robinson, John Vernon, Felicia Farr, Sheree North, Jacqueline Scott, William Schallert, Norman Fell, Benson Fong, Woodrow Parfrey, Rudy Diaz, Charles Matthau, Tom Tully, Albert Popwell

Cinematography: Michael Butler

Film Editor: Frank Morriss

Original Music: Lalo Schifrin

Written by Dean Riesner, Howard Rodman from the novel The Looters by John Reese

Produced by Jennings Lang, Don Siegel

Directed by...

The first film set I ever visited was for John Carpenter’s Starman. I was 13, and the film was shooting just outside Chattanooga, Tn, where I lived at the time. When I was leaving the set at the end of the day, the unit publicist (the great Peter J. Silbermann) gave me a copy of the script by Bruce A. Evans & Raynold Gideon and Dean Riesner, the first actual film script I ever read. It could have been anything I read first, but I’m glad that as I started try to break down structure and character and the crazy magic trick that is writing words on a page that then come to life on a film set, it was that script which I was studying. It’s a lovely piece of writing, and there’s a reason Jeff Bridges got nominated for an Oscar playing the lead role of...