Not only one of Hollywood’s most iconic film stars, Clint Eastwood is also one of tinseltown’s finest directors. Rodney Twelftree looks at his ten best films as director.

Gran Torino may well be Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece. Daniel Stephens takes a look at Eastwood’s brilliant 2008 film about a battle-weary old man who befriends the immigrant neighbours he once had such disdain for.

Clint Eastwood’s 2009 film Invictus is an idealist’s daydream, working like a life coach to uplift and inspire. The fact it is based on the true story of South Africa’s World Cup-winning rugby union team of 1995, and how the country, still coming to the terms with the enfranchisement of the black African and the ending of apartheid, found commonality during its hosting of the tournament, makes it all the more worthwhile.

If I was to give any credit to Clint Eastwood’s action-thriller The Gauntlet it would be for its poster. One of those cartoon-like depictions of a very un-cartoon-like film. Designed by the late artist Frank Fazetta, the poster depicts heroic alpha male Clint Eastwood protecting pretty blonde prostitute Sondra Locke from a haze of bullets. But other than the poster there isn’t a lot to recommend about Eastwood’s 1977 film. He’s not yet the accomplished director of Unforgiven, or later Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino, and he’s lumbered with Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack’s imbecilic script that beggars belief with every gun shot – and there’s A LOT of gun shots!

Clint Eastwood may be to many casual filmgoers the gun-toting authoritarian Harry Callahan from the “Dirty Harry” movies, or perhaps the man with no name from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, or more recently Frankie Dunn in “Million Dollar Baby. He’s an iconic Hollywood figure who has embodied some of the world’s most recognisable characters in many of the most prominent films of the last fifty years. But he’s also as accomplished behind the camera as he is in front of it, directing such classics as “Play Misty For Me”, “The …