Robert Redford left behind a body of work that was synonymous with movie stardom in the second half of the 20th century. With his soft hair and piercing blue eyes, he charmed audiences in 1960s and ’70s films like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting” and “The Way We Were.” But he was also as active behind the camera as he was in front of it, not only directing projects like “Ordinary People” and “Quiz Show,” but also pushing the likes of “All the President’s Men” into existence.
Throughout his career, Redford was interested in American institutions and how they can fail the public. Here’s where to stream some of his best work.
1967
‘Barefoot in the Park’
Redford first took on the role of timid, newly married Paul Bratter in Neil Simon’s Broadway play opposite Elizabeth Ashley as his carefree wife, Corie. The movie version, directed by Gene Saks, pairs him with Jane Fonda, and their union is tested when they move into a bohemian Greenwich Village walk-up that doesn’t fit with his reserved sensibilities. While the film is a dated battle of the sexes, Redford and Fonda still bubble with a kind of nascent movie-star energy. She’s sensuous and daffy; he’s a nervous wreck. In the Redford canon, “Barefoot in the Park” serves as an early example of what a gifted comedian he was. Here he plays against the confident type we came to know.
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1969
‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’
If Redford had one true film soul mate, it was Paul Newman, whom he first worked with on this irreverent western, directed by George Roy Hill and written by William Goldman. Famously, the studio wanted a bigger name to star alongside Newman, who plays Butch Cassidy. Redford said that it was Newman who lobbied for his casting. “That generosity really struck me hard, that he could be that generous and have that kind of integrity,” Redford told Esquire. “And then as the film went on, we both pushed aside our movie personas and just became friends.” That real-life kinship is evident onscreen, where the outlaws have the chemistry of a married couple, with Redford’s surly Sundance as the foil to Newman’s irrepressible Butch.
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1972
‘The Candidate’
In the decades since its release, the prescience of “The Candidate,” directed by Michael Ritchie and written by Jeremy Larner, has been referenced often. Larner himself argued that the film had “inspired” Dan Quayle, while the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman saw parallels in the film’s ending and Donald J. Trump’s 2016 political rise. Redford plays Bill McKay, a governor’s son who is recruited to run as a Democrat for the Senate against a Republican incumbent. The film follows the arc of the campaign as the idealistic, genuinely caring Bill becomes sanded down by the campaign process, eventually embracing the kind of vagaries that are commonplace in the political landscape. In one scene, he recites platitudes in the back seat of a car and you can see in Redford’s performance how Bill’s eyes have become deadened.
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1973
‘The Sting’
Redford reunited with both Newman and George Roy Hill for “The Sting,” the best picture-winner in which the actors play Depression-era con men running a scam on an Irish mob boss (played with a threatening aura by Robert Shaw). Set to Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” the film is once again an example of two stars working in tandem to maximize their charisma. Redford’s Johnny Hooker recruits Newman’s washed-up Henry Gondorff for a horse betting scheme, and the begrudging acceptance of one another morphs into a real camaraderie. After the final twist, with blood pouring out the side of Redford’s mouth, there’s a light in his eyes as he looks at Newman — as real a love as there ever was onscreen.
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1973
‘The Way We Were’
Just mentioning the name Hubbell is enough to make some people swoon. That’s the power of Redford in “The Way We Were,” Sydney Pollack’s romantic epic. Redford stars opposite Barbra Streisand as the mismatched pair whose love story starts in college in the 1930s. She’s a Jewish woman passionate about social causes. He’s a charming WASP with a literary bent. Though they fall in love and eventually marry, they cannot live up to each other’s expectations, leading to an ending in front of the Plaza Hotel that is so memorable it was mimicked in “Sex and the City.” Still, even though “The Way We Were” is best known for its ability to tug on heartstrings, it also serves as an example of Redford’s interest in movies with something on their mind.
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1975
‘Three Days of the Condor’
Besides Newman and Hill, one of Redford’s greatest collaborators was Pollack. He first directed Redford in “This Property Is Condemned” (1966), co-starring Natalie Wood, before moving on to “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) and “The Way We Were” (1973). But arguably their most thrilling team-up came in the paranoid classic “Three Days of the Condor.” Redford plays Turner, code-named Condor, a C.I.A. employee who works in a secret outpost searching through written text for hidden messages. One day he goes out for lunch and returns to find everyone in his office murdered. Quickly realizing it’s an inside job, Redford’s Turner meshes his terror with nerdy ingenuity to save his own skin.
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1976
‘All the President’s Men’
Not only does Redford give one of his best performances as Bob Woodward in Alan J. Pakula’s journalism procedural about the breaking of the Watergate story, Redford made the project possible thanks to his persistence. He later told The Washington Post that he was initially drawn to the story’s potential as a character study: “Two guys that couldn’t be more different. Different religions, different politics, different everything. And yet they had to work together, and they didn’t like each other very much.” At first, however, the reporters didn’t return his calls. It’s a blessing to cinema that Redford was so dogged: “All the President’s Men” is still a depiction of the journalistic process that gets your blood pumping. The passion Redford brought to the project comes through in his performance: you can almost feel Woodward’s heart beating through the screen as he makes calls and meets with his source, nicknamed, Deep Throat, in the shadows of a parking garage.
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1980
‘Ordinary People’
Some of the usual suspicions about an actor stepping behind a camera followed Redford’s transition to directing. In a 1980 profile in The New York Times, he insisted it was a natural progression. “I’ve been producing since 1969, and this may have been coming longer than people realize. Too often I’ve been frustrated at seeing something a certain way and not being able to do it,” he said. Redford’s debut feature was an incredible success, winning four Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. (Redford beat Martin Scorsese for “Raging Bull.”) In “Ordinary People,” based on Judith Guest’s novel, he crafts a story about the pain of grief that fractures a family mourning the loss of a teenage son. Redford elicits towering performances from his three leads: Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore as Calvin and Beth Jarrett, and Timothy Hutton, who won an Oscar for his work, as their younger son, Conrad, who is in the throes of a mental health crisis.
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1984
‘The Natural’
Is “The Natural” the best Robert Redford movie? Probably not. Is it a favorite among American dads? Possibly. Barry Levinson’s adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel wasn’t particularly praised upon release. Writing for The New York Times, Vincent Canby criticized the film in comparison to the book and wrote that although Redford, as the prodigious baseball player Roy Hobbs, “looks terrific, especially on the field in action, the performance is chilly.” Still, the fantastical tale of an athlete who gets a second chance in middle age has entered the sports movie canon, with Redford’s at-bat heroism enduring.
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1992
‘Sneakers’
Phil Alden Robinson’s “Sneakers” is perhaps the most underrated Robert Redford movie to have a passionate fan base. Case in point: In 2012 Slate devoted a series of articles entirely to the film in which the writer Julia Turner explained, “I don’t think I’ve ever loved a movie as much as I love ‘Sneakers.’” In 2020, The New York Times’s Gilbert Cruz wrote, “I’ve loved it for almost 30 years. It’s a weightless movie that makes me happy.” Redford stars as Martin Brice, alias Martin Bishop, who heads up a ragtag security company that proves to institutions how vulnerable they are. Martin and his men are roped into an international conspiracy connected to his past. Redford is part of an all-star ensemble that includes Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd and River Phoenix. They make all this breezy caper an especially well-acted endeavor.
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1994
‘Quiz Show’
Redford has always been interested in the notion of American honesty — as well as the lies that hide beneath the surface — which made him the perfect director for “Quiz Show.” The drama tells the real-life story of Charles Van Doren, the handsome, educated man who won thousands of dollars on the television game show “Twenty-One” in the 1950s. The competition, however, was rigged. Ralph Fiennes plays the well-spoken, camera-ready Van Doren, while John Turturro is Herbert Stempel, the Jewish contestant from Queens whom the network plots to remove. Redford ended up recruiting Scorsese to play a fictionalized bigwig.
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1998
‘The Horse Whisperer’
Redford’s first directorial effort to star himself was an adaptation of the best-selling novel “The Horse Whisperer.” Onscreen, he plays the title character, the Montana cowboy Tom Booker. He’s hired by Annie MacLean (Kristin Scott Thomas) to train the troublesome Pilgrim, who injured her daughter (a very young Scarlett Johansson). The New York Times critic Janet Maslin praised the movie as better than the book, writing, “Redford has found his own visually eloquent way to turn the potboiler into a panorama, with a deep-seated love for the Montana landscape against which his rapturously beautiful film unfolds.” The role also furthered the notion of Redford as an almost mythical figure of Americana.
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2013
‘All Is Lost’
Redford took on one of his most physically grueling roles in his late 70s, playing the unnamed central character in J.C. Chandor’s survival story. “All Is Lost” is just Redford, alone on a boat trying to survive. The peril begins when his small yacht is hit by a shipping container in the Indian Ocean, and throughout Redford is battered by the wind and water. Describing the role in an interview with The New York Times, he said: “Clearly he has a family. He’s not a bad person, but he’s failed in some way. So maybe this journey has to do with him sorting all that out.” Even with little dialogue you understand the resilience of Redford’s man, but also the pain that drove him out to sea in the first place.
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2016
‘Pete’s Dragon’
In the later years of his career, one of Redford’s most important collaborators was the director David Lowery. Lowery first cast Redford in his remake of the goofy 1977 Disney flick “Pete’s Dragon.” But Lowery’s version of the story about an orphan who befriends a dragon in a forest is unexpectedly soulful, and Redford fits into the narrative seamlessly, playing an elderly man and a true believer. It requires someone with Redford’s gravitas to ground the plot, but you absolutely buy into the notion that he believes in this magic.
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2018
‘The Old Man & the Gun’
Redford appeared in films after Lowery’s “The Old Man & the Gun” — even showing up in “Avengers: Endgame” in his Marvel Cinematic Universe role of Alexander Pierce. And yet “The Old Man & the Gun” felt at the time and still does like a perfect swan song for the actor. Riffing on the outlaw energy he first exuded in “Butch Cassidy,” Redford plays the real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker. The movie is a testament to the fact that all those years after his breakout roles, he could still seduce an audience. Just check out the scene in which he flirts with Sissy Spacek’s character in a diner. Criminal or not, he’s irresistible.
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