Robert Redford: Ten Great Films From a Brilliant Career

Robert Redford, left, with Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Screen Archives/Getty Images. Cover picture of Redford in Malibu, shot by Annie Leibovitz in 1980.

By Daniel O'Brien

OVER the course of an illustrious film career which began in 1960, Robert Redford starred in more than 50 films and directed nine. He was nominated for an Oscar four times, won best director for his debut Ordinary People in 1980, and received an honorary Oscar for his contribution to the film industry in 2001. It’s an extraordinary body of work – here we pick our ten favourites.

1. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Paul Newman insisted on the 

(relatively unknown at the time)

Robert Redford to be in the film.

Robert Redford defined his Hollywood stardom in 1969 with George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film that reconfigured both the western and the buddy movie. Riding the momentum of New Hollywood titles like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, Hill’s film struck a balance between fresh storytelling and classic Hollywood style.

Playing opposite Paul Newman’s wily Butch, Redford’s cool, sharp-shooting Sundance creates one of cinema’s most iconic duos. Their charisma and wit onscreen are as striking as their arresting good looks. But this is also carefully balanced. Sundance’s inability to swim, for example, adds humour and vulnerability, humanising Redford’s star power. The final defiant freeze-frame is culturally iconic, while the film’s legacy lives on through the Sundance Film Festival, providing a platform for independent filmmakers.

2. Jeremiah Jonhnson (1972)

Redford’s portrayal of 19th-century mountain man Jeremiah Johnson tells the tale of a disillusioned figure retreating into the wilderness, seeking solace in the solitude, beauty and danger of the Rocky Mountains.

Sparse in dialogue and narrative, the film relies on Redford’s quiet authority to carry it. Very much a product of its era, it frames Johnson in violent clashes with both Native Americans and nature itself. Most significantly, it marked the beginning of Redford’s long partnership with director Sydney Pollack, a fruitful collaboration that would later include The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, and Out of Africa.

3. The Sting (1973)

Reuniting with director George Roy Hill, Redford teamed up again with Paul Newman for The Sting, a stylish 1930s caper about two grifters scheming to outwit a crime boss, played with icy menace by Robert Shaw – a stark contrast to the warmth between the leads. This time it’s Newman’s turn to wear the moustache, with Redford clean-shaven, a playful reversal of their Butch Cassidy look. With its clever twists, Scott Joplin ragtime piano score and screen-wipe transitions, the film won seven Oscars at the 46th Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, and earned Redford a nomination for best actor.

4. All the President’s Men (1976)

Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford 

in All the President's Men.

Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men paired Redford with Dustin Hoffman in a serious contemporary role, dramatising the Watergate scandal just two years after Nixon’s resignation. A taut, uncompromising account of investigative journalism, the film showcases Redford’s range in a part that eschews glamour for realism and the pursuit of truth. Fifty years later it remains one of cinema’s most sophisticated political dramas. The project owed much to Redford, who approached Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein before securing rights to their book, and adapting it for the screen.

5. Ordinary People (1980)

Redford’s directorial debut, Ordinary People was a huge success, winning best picture and earning him the Oscar for best director. A powerful family drama about grief and alienation, it starred Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton. The film transformed Redford’s career, expanding his influence behind the camera.

6. Sneakers (1992)

Directed by Phil Alden Robinson, Sneakers let Redford dip back into the caper genre, this time with a tech-age twist. He plays a former hacker turned security consultant who, along with a mismatched crew (Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix), is pulled into a plot over a code-breaking device. The film mixes comedy, intrigue and early 1990s paranoia about surveillance, while retaining a breezy touch as Redford holds it all together with his familiar charm.

7. Quiz Show (1994)

Redford’s fourth feature film, Quiz Show, returned to his interest in public scandal – this time shifting from the White House to NBC’s 1950s game show Twenty-One and the controversy surrounding contestant Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes). Exposing how producers rigged the contest to engineer Van Doren’s success, the film probes questions of truth, media and morality, echoing Redford’s enduring fascination with power and integrity in American culture. Nominated for four Oscars, Quiz Show remains one of Redford’s most accomplished and incisive directorial works.

8. The Great Gatsby (1974)

Mia Farrow and Robert Redford 

in The Great Gatsby. 

Jack Clayton’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby cast Redford as one of literature’s most enigmatic figures: Jay Gatsby, the wealthy, detached, and obsessive dreamer pining for Daisy Buchanan (Mia Farrow). With his good looks and charisma, Redford embodied Gatsby’s allure, mystery and melancholy, even as the film itself divided critics. Lavish costumes and period design capture the excess of the Jazz Age, while Redford grounds the story’s glittering parties with Gatsby’s aching loneliness.

9. All Is Lost (2013)

J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost is an engaging piece of action survival cinema, with Redford at 77 proving he could still carry a film entirely alone. He plays an unnamed sailor in the Indian Ocean whose boat is punctured by a drifting shipping container, an accident that escalates into a fight for survival on the open sea. With almost no dialogue (just 51 words), the drama relies on Redford’s presence and physicality. Like Jeremiah Johnson transposed from mountains to water, the film is elemental and meditative, and Redford delivers a late-career performance of remarkable endurance, which earned him the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best actor.

10. The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun was announced as Redford’s final starring role, and it feels like a fitting farewell. While he later appeared briefly in Avengers: Endgame (2019) and in the anthology film Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia (2020), this was the last feature he headlined.

Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a real-life career criminal who, well into his seventies, escapes prison and keeps robbing banks with a smile. The film isn’t about suspense so much as presence, and Redford brings the same easy charisma that defined his early career. Gentle, nostalgic and playful, it stands as an apt curtain call for a legendary performer and filmmaker.

Daniel O'Brien, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex

Almost Unimaginable Beauty and Opulence: the Paradise Pleasure Gardens of Ancient Persia

Nine paradise gardens in Iran are collectively listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Eram Garden (pictured above) built in the 12th century is one of the most splendid.  

By Peter Edwell

Some of the most enduring ancient myths in the Persian world were centred around gardens of almost unimaginable beauty and opulence.

The biblical Garden of Eden and the Epic of Gilgamesh’s Garden of the Gods are prominent examples. In these myths, paradise was an opulent garden of tranquillity and abundance.

But how did this concept of paradise originate? And what did these beautiful gardens look and feel like in antiquity?

Pairi-daēza is where we get the word ‘paradise’

The English word “paradise” derives from an old Persian word pairidaeza or pairi-daēza, which translates as “enclosed garden”.

The origins of paradise gardens lie in Mesopotamia and Persia (modern Iraq and Iran).

The Garden of the Gods from the Epic of Gilgamesh from about 2000 BCE is one of the earliest attested in literature.

Some argue it was also the inspiration for the legend of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis. In both of these stories, paradise gardens functioned as a type of utopia.

When the Achaemenid kings ruled ancient Persia (550–330 BCE), the development of royal paradise gardens grew significantly. The paradise garden of the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, who ruled around 550 BCE, is the earliest physical example yet discovered.

During his reign, Cyrus built a palace complex at Pasargadae in Persia. The entire complex was adorned with gardens which included canals, bridges, pathways and a large pool.

One of the gardens measured 150 metres by 120 metres (1.8 hectares). Archaeologists found evidence for the garden’s division into four parts, symbolising the four quarters of Cyrus’s vast empire.

Technological wonders

A feature of paradise gardens in Persia was their defiance of often harsh, dry landscapes.

This required ingenuity in supplying large volumes of water required for the gardens. Pasargadae was supplied by a sophisticated hydraulic system, which diverted water from the nearby Pulvar River.

The tradition continued throughout the Achaemenid period. Cyrus the Younger, probably a descendant of Cyrus the Great, had a palace at Sardis (in modern Turkey), which included a paradise garden.

According to the ancient Greek writer, Xenophon, the Spartan general Lysander visited Cyrus at the palace around 407 BCE.

When he walked in the garden, astounded by its intricate design and beauty, Lysander asked who planned it. Cyrus replied that he had designed the garden himself and planted its trees.

Perhaps the ultimate ancient paradise garden was the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

In one tradition, the gardens were built by the neo-Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BCE).

The gardens were so magnificent and technologically advanced they were later counted among the Seven Wonders of the World.

Perhaps the ultimate ancient paradise garden was the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon. mikroman6/Getty Images

In a later Roman account, the Hanging Gardens consisted of vaulted terraces resting on cube-shaped pillars.

Flowing water was a key feature, with elaborate machines raising water from the Euphrates river. Fully grown trees with vast root systems were supported by the terraces.

In another account, the Hanging Gardens were built by a Syrian king for his Persian wife to remind her of her homeland.

When the Sasanian dynasty (224–651 CE) came to power in Persia, its kings also built paradise gardens. The 147-hectare palace of Khosrow II (590–628 CE) at Qasr-e Shirin was almost entirely set in a paradise garden.

The paradise gardens were rich in symbolic significance. Their division into four parts symbolised imperial power, the cardinal directions and the four elements in Zoroastrian lore: air, earth, water and fire.

The gardens also played a religious role, offering a glimpse of what eternity might look like in the afterlife.

They were also a refuge in the midst of a harsh world and unforgiving environments. Gilgamesh sought solace and immortality in the Garden of the Gods following the death of his friend Enkidu.

According to the Bible, God himself walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening.

But in both cases, disappointment and distress followed.

Gilgamesh discovered the non-existence of immortality. God discovered the sin of Adam and Eve.

Paradise on Earth

The tradition of paradise gardens continued after the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century CE.

The four-part gardens (known as chahar-bagh) of the Persian kingdoms were also a key feature of the Islamic period.

The Garden of Paradise described in the Quran comprised four gardens divided into two pairs. The four-part garden became symbolic of paradise on Earth.

The tradition of paradise gardens has continued in Iran to the present day.

Nine paradise gardens in Iran are collectively listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Eram garden, built in about the 12th century CE, and the 19th-century Bagh-e Shahzadeh are among the most splendid.

Today, the word “paradise” evokes a broader range of images and experiences. It can foster many different images of idyllic physical and spiritual settings.

But the magnificent enclosed gardens of the ancient Persian world still inspire us to imagine what paradise on Earth might look and feel like.

Peter Edwell, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Macquarie University

The Sting of Goodbye: Robert Redford, America’s Golden Rebel Who Rewrote Hollywood’s Script with Charm, Conscience and Cinematic Grace

Robert Redford with his Oscar for directing his debut film “Ordinary People" in 1981. It garnered critical and commercial success and won four Oscars. Cover picture of the actor in Malibu, shot by Annie Leibovitz. 

By Nathan Abrams

Robert Redford was no airhead

but a sensitive actor that used his

good looks to his advantage. 

Robert Redford was perhaps everybody’s idea of a classical Hollywood movie actor. His conventional good looks – his blond hair, boyish charm and chiselled chin – led him to be cast as a sex symbol and a romantic lead opposite Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967), Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973), and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985).

Dustin Hoffman described him as a “walking surfboard”. But the Californian golden boy belied his appearance. No airhead, beneath the surface was a shy and sensitive actor who used his looks to his advantage, insisting on starring in and later directing movies with weight. These included a series of anti-establishment and countercultural films that reflected his anti-corruption and pro-environmental activism.

From the early 1960s through to the 2020s, Robert Redford appeared in some of the most iconic, if unconventional, films of the second half of the 20th century. Those of us born in the late 1960s and early 1970s grew up with Redford. He came to attention as the timid, newly married Paul Bratter in Neil Simon’s Broadway play, Barefoot in the Park, in 1967, before starring in the movie of the same name.

His breakout role was as the titular Sundance in the irreverent and subversive paean to the wild west, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), beginning what would later be called a bromance with his co-star, Paul Newman. He teamed up again with Newman, a fellow activist, in the Depression-era set The Sting (1973), which led to Redford’s first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.

That same year, he starred in The Way We Were alongside Streisand, who described him as “the blond, suntanned California guy, surfing and riding horses”. Directed by Sydney Pollack, Redford would go on to star in a further six of his films. The director called him “an interesting metaphor for America, a golden boy with a darkness in him”.

Following his liberal instincts, Redford appeared in two of the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam War films that encapsulated the pervasive feeling of distrust and suspicion of the government that followed the administration of Richard Nixon.

In the spy thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975), Redford was an introverted CIA codebreaker caught up in a conspiracy. And in All the President’s Men (1976), he played the real-life Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward alongside Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein as they exposed the Watergate Hotel scandal that helped to bring down Nixon.

The film, which Redford was instrumental in bringing to the screen, was so powerful that it has been credited by some with swinging the presidential election of that year to the Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Redford branched into directing with Ordinary People in 1980, about an upper-middle-class family’s fracturing with grief following their son’s death. The film starred Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore and won four Oscars, including for best picture and best director, beating Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.

Redford’s later efforts were not always as successful, but Quiz Show in 1994, about the real-life scandal of a fixed television game show in the 1950s, received Academy nominations.

Other films he directed showcased his politics. The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), about the fight to protect a small beanfield in a New Mexico village against larger business and political interests, reflected Redford’s own concerns about the environment and land preservation.

His 2007 Lions for Lambs explored the impact of US foreign policy through the intersecting lives of a US congressman (Tom Cruise), a journalist (Meryl Streep) and an academic (Redford) against the backdrop of the war on terror in Afghanistan.

In 2014, Redford even joined the Marvel cinematic universe, starring as US government leader and secret Hydra operative Alexander Pierce in 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame in 2019. It was a callback to those 1970s paranoid thrillers, especially Three Days of the Condor. This introduced him to a younger generation of fans and audiences most likely unfamiliar with his earlier work.

“The idea of the outlaw has always been very appealing to me. If you look at some of the films, it’s usually having to do with the outlaw sensibility, which I think has probably been my sensibility. I think I was just born with it,” Redford said in 2018.

“I wanted to tell stories about the America that I grew up in. And for me, I was not interested in the red, white and blue part of America. I was interested in the grey part – that’s where complexity lies.”

Nathan Abrams, Professor of Film Studies, Bangor University

New York Spring/Summer 2026 Streetstyle: Beyond the Runway ~ the Sartorial Stories Walking the Streets

Gleaming, green leopard skin combined with floaty feathers, a striking look outside the Lapointe show during New York Fashion Week. Photograph by Brittany Scott for DAM. 

As New York enjoyed the electric energy of Fashion Week, the streets surrounding the city’s runways became their own stage, where creativity, individuality, and style converged. Spring/Summer 2026 marked yet another vibrant chapter in the ongoing dialogue between designers and the public, with the sidewalks acting as a living, breathing showcase of the trends shaping the season, photographed by Brittany Scott

Brilliant colour and

diaphanous silk lit up 

a streetcorner at NYFW. 

BEYOND the catwalks, streetstyle has become a barometer for cultural currents, a space where personal expression meets the influence of global fashion movements. This season, the city’s sartorial pulse oscillated between maximalist exuberance and understated elegance. 

Oversized silhouettes, bold prints, and unexpected color combinations dominated, while a new wave of tailored minimalism offered a counterpoint—proof that modern street style thrives in the tension between statement and subtlety. 

Accessories were no afterthoughts; oversized handbags, sculptural jewellery, and experimental footwear punctuated ensembles, emphasizing how attention to detail transforms everyday dressing into performance.

Yet street style is about more than clothing, it captures an atmosphere, a collective mood that pulses through the city during Fashion Week. There is a sense of possibility in the air, a tension between anticipation and spontaneity as editors, influencers, buyers, and fashionistas intersect in fleeting encounters on cobblestone streets and city avenues. The streets themselves become a canvas, reflecting the city’s rhythm: yellow taxis, bustling sidewalks, and towering skyscrapers all frame the sartorial spectacle.

Insightful images play a crucial role in documenting this urban theatre. Our photographer, Brittany Scott, captured the interplay of movement, light, and texture, each frame preserves a moment of creative audacity and cultural commentary. From the eclectic layering that defines New York’s streetwise aesthetic to the quiet confidence of monochrome ensembles, these images reveal how the city’s fashion ecosystem extends far beyond the confines of the runway.

In this feature, we celebrate the diverse voices and visual narratives that defined New York Fashion Week’s streets for Spring/Summer 2026. From the bold and avant-garde to the quietly inventive, this season’s street style demonstrates how personal style continues to inform and inspire global fashion discourse, offering a vivid, intimate glimpse into the city’s sartorial soul. ~ Antonio Visconti

Scroll down or tap pictures to see more highlights from New York Fashion Week Streetstyle