Hereafter

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HEREAFTER

Directed by Clint Eastwood (Warner Brothers, 2010)

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For almost half a century Clint Eastwood has been making films about death, but nearly all of these movies have been violent adventures in which death arrives as an apocalyptic horseman of vengeance, punishment, or damnation. Now, at long last, the octogenarian filmmaker is taking a curious, unblinking look at death as loss and wondering--in a way his earlier films rarely did--what it is like for those left behind in its wake.

Over the past two decades Eastwood has become America's most serious mainstream filmmaker, probing and dissecting the Hollywood myths of …