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Actor · Voice actor · 1937–2021

Ned Beatty

9: briefs
13:00: average
117 min: in total

On film.briefs9

Alambrista!

Robert Milton Young · 1977

Alambrista! (1977), written and directed by Robert Milton Young, follows Roberto, a Mexican farmer who crosses into the US to find work. Shot on location with non-professional actors, it observes his journey with minimal dialogue, no exposition, and sustained attention to physical detail. The film avoids drama, psychology and commentary, instead building meaning through repetition, duration and quiet encounters. Inducted into the National Film Registry in 2023, it remains a rigorous, unsentimental portrait of endurance.

Hopscotch

Ronald Neame · 1980

Hopscotch (1980) is a low-key, Mozart-scored spy comedy starring Walter Matthau as Miles Kendig, a CIA veteran who retaliates against forced retirement by writing and publishing an explosive memoir — mailing chapters to rival intelligence agencies across Europe and the US. Directed by Ronald Neame and adapted by Bryan Forbes and Brian Garfield, it trades thrills for procedural wit, treating espionage as bureaucratic farce rather than mortal peril. Its pleasures lie in Matthau’s dry authority, Arthur Ibbetson’s unshowy camerawork, and Ian Fraser’s precisely deployed classical score.

Mikey and Nicky

Elaine May · 1976

Elaine May’s 1976 film follows two Philadelphia men—a desperate mob associate and his loyal friend—over one fractured night. Built around John Cassavetes and Peter Falk’s physically exacting performances, it uses repetition, silence, and unvarnished realism to trace the erosion of intimacy under pressure. Shot over 110 nights and edited for nearly two years, it resists genre expectations to focus on gesture, memory, and the labour of sustaining a relationship neither man fully understands.

Nashville

Robert Altman · 1975

Robert Altman’s 1975 ensemble film follows twenty-four characters in the Nashville music industry over five days, culminating in a political rally and an unexplained assassination. Built from Joan Tewkesbury’s ethnographically grounded script and shot on location with overlapping dialogue and diegetic music, it treats fame, race, and populism as systems rather than subjects — observing more than judging, accumulating more than resolving.

Wise Blood

John Huston · 1979

John Huston’s 1979 film Wise Blood adapts Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel with formal precision and moral gravity. Brad Dourif stars as Hazel Motes, a war veteran who founds an atheistic church only to spiral into self-annihilation. Shot in Georgia with Gerry Fisher’s subdued cinematography and Alex North’s sparse score, the film sustains a tone of grave absurdity, refusing psychological explanation or redemptive closure. Its power lies in its fidelity to O’Connor’s vision: belief and unbelief as equally binding, the body as theological text, and the American South as a landscape saturated with inherited conviction.

All the President's Men

Alan J. Pakula · 1976

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein chasing a break-in story that grows into the reporting that helped end a presidency, told almost entirely from inside the newsroom.

Network

Sidney Lumet · 1976

Sidney Lumet's satire follows a failing network that builds a hit show around its anchor's on-air unravelling, with four Oscar-winning performances built almost entirely on monologue.

Rango

Gore Verbinski · 2011

A pet chameleon stranded in the desert invents a tough-guy persona to survive a lawless town, and the fiction becomes real enough to matter. Gore Verbinski's 2011 animated Western leans on genre homage and an unusually cinematic visual approach for an animated film.

Toy Story 3

Lee Unkrich · 2010

Andy leaves for college and his toys are accidentally donated to a daycare centre ruled by a resentful stuffed bear. Lee Unkrich's 2010 conclusion to the Toy Story trilogy pushes the franchise's premise, toys who fear abandonment, to its most literal extreme.