A titan passed this week with the death of Robert Redford. An actor, director, activist, and mentor, he was as big as they come in Hollywood, and beyond. While we adore his work behind the camera with projects like “Ordinary People” and “Quiz Show,” we wanted to focus on his magnetic presence on screen in 11 of our favorite performances, a sampling that just skims the surface of this man’s underrated range.“Barefoot in the Park”Robert Redford’s breakthrough movie role was one he knew well. He had starred in Neil Simon’s hit romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, appearing as newlywed lawyer Paul Bratter for a year. The play was a love letter to Simon’s first wife, Joan, and Jane Fonda played the ebullient, free-spirited Corie, the far showier role. The more buttoned-down, slightly sardonic husband role was a bigger acting challenge, especially in the midst of one laugh-out-loud line after another, the magnetism of Jane Fonda, and the company that included legends Mildred Natwick and Charles Boyer. The audience had to see Paul as serious but not stuffy, as someone who would love and be loved deeply by Corie. Redford understood that while some of the characters thought Paul did not know how to have fun, it was important for us to root for the marriage. Admittedly, it helped that he had movie star looks and charisma, but what made it work was the way he delivered Paul’s understated dialogue with brilliant comic timing. Even when Corie told Paul he was unreachably stuffy and Paul was frustrated with Corie’s impulsivity, we could see the way they balanced each other. Plus, he got to do a drunk scene! It was fun to see the proper lawyer tipsy and give Corie a chance to be the responsible one. Redford will justly be remembered for his dramatic roles, direction, and dedication to independent film and good causes, but I think he was at his best playing characters like Paul, who might appear solemn but who understood life well enough to find it funny. – Nell MinowNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“Sneakers“Robert Redford’s peak decade was the 1970s, before the Sundance Film Institute (founded in 1979) began eating up his time. In the ‘80s and beyond, he made fewer movies. Some of the biggest, though engrossing, were probably too solemn for their own good. “Sneakers,” an early example of the cyberthriller, marked a welcome return of the Redford who starred in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting,” and “The Hot Rock”: dashing, smart, observant, and fun to watch. He plays Martin Bishop, a pioneering hacker from the 1970s who now leads a group of fellow counterculture techies who have transferred their skills and now test the security of systems for San Francisco corporations. Bishop’s crew gets pulled into a conspiracy and Martin is framed for murder, setting the stage for an increasingly daring series of missions that show off the cleverness of Bishop and his men, who are played by an all-star team of character actors with terrific comic chemistry: River Phoenix, Dan Aykroyd, Sidney Poitier as an ex-CIA agent, and David Strathairn as Irwin “Whistler” Emery, a phone hacker who happens to be blind. The rest of the cast is stacked with appealing pros, including Mary McDonnell as Bishop’s ex-girlfriend Liz and Stephen Tobolowsky as the employee of a toy company that serves as cover for the bad guys.As was often the case with Redford, an appealing actor who was also a resourceful producer, “Sneakers” was his baby, and he put together the team that made it, starting with writer-director Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams”), whose touch is as sure as it is light. Redford’s performance anchors the entire production and reminds audiences of why he became a superstar in the first place: he knew how to deliver a good time without resorting to cheap manipulations and narrative shortcuts that insult the audience’s intelligence. Bishop is incredibly assured and bold but not reckless or impulsive, and he cares about his people and has a code and ideals. The movie’s denouement is hilarious and perfect, and ties “Sneakers” into the ‘60s and ‘70s ethos of breaking rules and sticking it to The Man. – Matt Zoller SeitzNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“The Natural“It seems unfathomable that Robert Redford only made one baseball movie. Considering his Golden Boy charm and his resolute idealism, he seemed a perfect fit for a sport known for creating larger-than-life heroes fashioned into art on trading cards and embedded into the American mythos. But his portrayal of Roy Hobbs in Barry Levinson’s adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s mystical same-titled novel “The Natural” proved to be the actor’s only cinematic flirtation with the sport.The film is brimming with baseball lore. For one, Hobbs is a Nebraska farm boy with ungodly pitching talent who ventures from his humble rural surroundings toward Chicago for a tryout with the Cubs. Along the way, he challenges the Whammer, a character based on Babe Ruth, to an at-bat, wherein the slugger calls his shot. After that encounter, he strikes a fancy with a woman who shoots him in a hotel, mirroring the real-life story of former Ruth teammate Billy Jurgens, who’d later be traded to the Cubs and become a witness to the Babe’s actual called shot. The wound puts Hobbs out of baseball for 16 years, and when he returns as a recent signing to the New York Knights, equipped with a bat he carved from a tree struck by lightning, he emerges as a hitting savant akin to Ted Williams. He also confronts a tarnished game on the verge of transition, taken over by night baseball, gangster owners, and a cartoonist (Robert Duvall) who will soon be replaced by television.As Hobbs, Redford is the perfect image of stained innocence. His weathered features reveal a man searching for one last chance at greatness, as he carries the shame of having wasted his god-given talent. In scenes opposite Kim Basinger, a kind of femme fatale, he is measured but easily taken. In sequences opposite Glenn Close, his former first love, he is bashful and sheepish. Caleb Deschanel’s evocative cinematography envelops Redford in shadows, understanding the inner complexity of a man who appears to be uncomplicated on the surface. And as Hobbs rounds the bases, assured that his triumphant final homer will never land, Redford looks like the best there ever was to be in a baseball movie. – Robert DanielsNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“All is Lost“Robert Redford was so impossibly handsome that he almost had to become a movie star. Hollywood demanded it. And, for years, he put those good lucks to effect in romantic dramas, thrillers, and even comedies. He refined a form of silent acting through an amorous look, a silent chuckle, or a blinding smile. What some mistakenly saw as natural charisma was often something more —a carefully considered understanding of how to use the camera’s eye to see him. He knew ALL of his angles and always found his light. Perhaps this is what engendered in the artist a respect for quiet. Redford’s movies, especially as a director, are rarely hurried, lingering in moments that other actors and filmmakers would have rushed through.All of this understanding of the physical half of acting and the power of staying quiet culminated in one of his best performances, the captivating story of an unnamed man stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Redford didn’t direct “All is Lost” (that was J.C. Chandor), but it feels so of a piece with his interests in the natural world and understanding of acting that it feels like he could have. With only 51 words in the entire film, Redford conveys the immediacy of this man’s predicament in a way that’s essential to the piece’s success. We believe in his situation. We believe in his fear. We believe in his determination. Even a half-century into his career, one of the biggest movie stars who ever lived could still disappear into a role, even without the crutch of dialogue to define a character. It’s one of the best performances of not just Redford’s career but its entire era. – Brian TallericoNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“The Way We Were“So hopelessly romantic it’s become a foundational text for star-crossed movie romances, “The Way We Were,” directed by Sydney Pollack from a screenplay and novel by Arthur Laurents, features two of the most iconic performances from its stars, Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. She’s Katie Morosky, a staunchly political Marxist Jew. He’s Hubbell Gardiner, a sandy-haired WASP without a care in the world. Their two lives collide again and again, from the late 1930s through WWII and into the McCarthy-era 1950s. The oil-and-water combination of their characters adds to the sizzling chemistry that flows between Streisand and Redford throughout the film. At first, Katie is solely attracted to Hubbell’s good looks, and Redford is perfectly cast, his hair never more perfect, his jawline chiseled like a statue, and he wears the hell out of several sweaters. But Katie is also attracted to his mind and to his writing. Here is where Redford’s intellectualism comes in handy.In lesser hands, Hubbell would have just been a pretty face with a charming smile and a goofy aloofness, but in Redford’s hands, he is a man at war with his own nature. He knows Katie is right to push him towards greatness. He knows that her steadfast politics are admirable. Yet, when they become a liability for his career, he cuts her loose. In every one of their argumentative scenes, his conflicting consciousness plays out just beneath the surface. It appears in a flicker in Redford’s eyes, in the way he looks at Katie during one of her impassioned speeches, or the way his body deflates in resignation when he realizes he’ll never be the man she thinks he can be. In their final scene, Katie still has her fire and Hubbell his charm, but underneath, Redford allows for just the right amount of regret and pathos to bubble up through his impossibly blue-eyed gaze as he leaves Katie to her politics and walks away from the greatest love he’s ever known. – Marya E. GatesNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“Three Days of the Condor“Among the crucial paranoid thrillers of the Watergate era, frequent Redford collaborator Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor” finds the star in the investigative “All the President’s Men” register, a year before that more widely celebrated Alan J. Pakula picture came to define the period marked by a feeling of unease and suspicion. Embracing those subtle apprehensions about the shady conspiracies unfolding within the government, Redford delivers a subtly enigmatic and viscerally searching performance as CIA operative Turner, working at the secretive American Literary Historical Society with the odd task of mining foreign literature for consequential spy codes.After his entire team gets murdered when he’s out to lunch, you can trace the ongoing shifts in Redford’s performance gradually, shedding his trusting façade for one that is wary and tough as Turner tries to negotiate with his unsympathetic overlords and outsmart his pursuers. Dressed in a jeans-and-sweater look paired with impossibly well-fitted tweed blazers and navy peacoats of turned-up collars—it’s apt to mention that no one running for dear life has any right to look this devastatingly handsome— Redford brings a quietly towering poise to Turner’s assured body language that sometimes has a hint of tentativeness. Redford calibrates those occasional traces of vulnerability we see in Turner relentlessly, especially when he goes toe-to-toe with Max von Sydow’s uncompromising baddie in the elevators, phone booths, and street corners of Christmastime New York.There is a late scene in the film when Faye Dunaway, playing Turner’s temporary hostage (and hasty romantic interest) Kathy, delivers an observation about his eyes. “They don’t lie. They don’t look away very much, and they don’t miss anything,” she says. There couldn’t be a better way to sum up how Redford masters his character’s unwavering intensity and morality, qualities that are bound to survive regardless of the target that remains on his back. – Tomris LafflyNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“The Old Man and the Gun“Just because someone is lucky enough to have a long, celebrated career as a screen icon does not always guarantee that they close out said career with a worthy capper. With “The Old Man and the Gun,” Robert Redford not only managed to avoid this fate, but he also delivered one of the very best performances of his entire career. In the film, sort of based on a true story, he plays Forrest Tucker, a man of a certain age who has spent his life robbing banks armed with nothing more than his disarming demeanor. He does it so well that, when he knocks over one Texas bank, a police detective (Casey Affleck) inside the building at the time doesn’t realize that anything is happening until it is all over. When the detective publicly vows that he will bring Forrest in, he responds by repeatedly teasing his pursuer while pulling new jobs with his equally aged cohorts (Danny Glover and Tom Waits). At the same time, he has made the acquaintance of a widow (Sissy Spacek) and become instantly smitten with her. While the possibility of arrest and imprisonment has never held him back before, the fact that he now has someone with whom he might like to share his life outside of a jail setting might prove to be his ultimate undoing.The film reunited Redford with director David Lowery, with whom he had previously worked on a better-than-expected remake of “Pete’s Dragon.” Over those two projects, they clearly developed the kind of simpatico actor-director rapport that Redford most famously shared with Sydney Pollack. As Forrest, Redford is able to deploy the still-considerable charm and charisma that made him such a superstar for so long. Of course, that charm was so obvious that it often distracted from the fact that he also possessed strong and canny acting chops as well, but that is not a problem here. He may be as charming as ever, but he invests Forrest with a depth that gives the material some surprising weight. His scenes with Spacek, Glover, and Waits are an absolute joy to watch. Unfortunately, much like the character Redford was playing, the film itself was a throwback to a different era—one where quiet, quirky narratives aimed at adult audiences that favored offbeat characters over flashy special effects could still thrive—and it disappeared from view far too quickly. In the wake of his passing, there will be reminders of his fine work in better-known films. But be sure to add “The Old Man and the Gun” to your watchlist, because it allowed him to cap off his extraordinary career on the highest possible note. – Peter SobczynskiNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“The Candidate”Robert Redford was already established as a major movie star in 1972 via such vehicles as “Barefoot in the Park” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” when he executed a wickedly entertaining spin on his golden good looks and matinee idol status with a slyly understated and darkly funny performance as the progressive community service lawyer turned slickly packaged United States Senate hopeful Bill McKay in the prescient and biting political satire “The Candidate.” Re-teaming with “Downhill Racer” director Michael Ritchie for this still-relevant look at the machinations of modern-day campaigns, Redford is a marvel to watch as he delivers the insightful dialogue from Jeremy Larner (former principal speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy), who won Best Original Screenplay. On occasion, Redford puts a little hitch in his delivery—a moment where he almost says one thing, and then a gleam comes to his eyes as he pivots to a newer thought—and it imbues the work with authenticity.Redford does a masterful job of playing a man who gradually sells off his soul, piece by piece, as he transitions from a denim-clad, grass-roots idealist who drinks Hamm’s beer into an empty suit who hobnobs with power brokers and becomes enthralled with power. We can feel the humanity leaking from McKay’s psyche as he makes compromise after compromise. With his star rising, the now polished and nattily attired McKay addresses a packed auditorium, speaking in processed nothing-isms, e.g., “I think the time has come when the American people realize that we’re in this together, and that we sink or swim together.” Redford is chillingly good at telling us that the passionate, real, and immensely likable good guy we met at the beginning of this story has been swallowed whole by ambition. – Richard RoeperNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“A Bridge Too Far“I texted a friend the morning he died. “I’m sorry for your loss.” She loves Redford, her mom loves Redford, everyone loves Redford. He felt like our movie star. I could have sent that text message to anyone, but I sent it to her because sometimes she calls me Hub, after the character in “The Way We Were.” Redford’s emotions and passions were inconvenient. Like Jane Fonda, his occasional co-star, his beliefs weren’t popular even if his films were. Tommy Lee Jones’ Thaddeus Stevens: “This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the good of the people without caring much for any of them.” That was Redford. He produced and directed movies about the essential corruption of the American character, yet he did so not out of spite, but out of mercy and grace. But I like him as a jobbing actor, too, as I do so many philanthropists, be they John Cassavetes or Redford’s friend and co-star Paul Newman. Redford never once did less than his best.“A Bridge Too Far” is Richard Attenborough’s panoramic view of the Second World War, specifically the disastrous operation Market Garden. The allies decided to take Holland and blew it. The war waged on. Attenborough gave each bridge its own story. Somehow, in a cast that included Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, Dirk Bogarde, and Michael Caine, Redford stands out. His honest American pessimism contrasts with the British sense of duty. He’s a man whose every facial expression suggests an entire stateside life outside of his uniform. A high school principal, a filling station attendant, a salesman. Redford isn’t a soldier; he’s been forced to become one. And his every sentence betrays a reticence to duty. He has to lead a charge against an implacable German defense. He knows it’s suicide, but he’s trying to convince himself it isn’t. He tells jokes, his hands shake, and he offers the lord’s prayer to the sound of cannon fire. You wait for the whole picture for him, two hours and change, and he closes it with unflappable performative stiffness. He’s not fooling anyone, and he doesn’t try. He gives it his all because all eyes are on him, just like Robert Redford himself. I only wish we had more performances by this great actor to pore over and study and love with our whole hearts. – Scout TafoyaNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“Downhill Racer“No tribute to Robert Redford would overlook his impact on the landscape of independent film, as the founder of the Sundance Institute and its marquee film festival. But perhaps less widely discussed is the actor’s profound, lifelong love of skiing, which—even before “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” catapulted him to superstar status—had compelled Redford to personally produce and star in “Downhill Racer,” still one of Hollywood’s most ambitious attempts to film the sport. As David Chappellet, a brash young member of the U.S. skiing team who clashes with the team’s coach (Gene Hackman), Redford delivered one of his most iconic performances, capturing the iron will in Chappellet’s obsessive pursuit of victory without ever thawing out his angular, recalcitrant character in scenes off the slopes. On the strengths of Redford’s all-in performance, for which he did much of his own free skiing, Roger Ebert gave “Downhill Racer” four stars and wrote that it “becomes the best movie ever made about sports—without really being about sports at all.” Perhaps that’s because skiing was always about so much more for Redford, by this point living on a mountaintop in Provo, Utah, with his wife, near the ski resort he’d acquired and christened Sundance in 1968. “For me, personally, skiing holds everything,” he’d told Ebert during filming. “I used to race cars, but skiing is a step beyond that. It removes the machinery and puts you one step closer to the elements. And it’s a complete physical expression of freedom.” – Isaac FeldbergNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch“All the President’s Men““If you’re gonna do it, do it right. If you’re gonna hype it, hype it with the facts.”Ever motivated to merge his Hollywood business savvy with a strict social conscience, Robert Redford spearheaded the attempt to adapt Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s manuscript about their work uncovering the Watergate scandal, “All the President’s Men,” and in so doing came away with one of the most timeless tales of journalistic courage ever committed to screen. One of the smartest moves producer Redford and director Alan J. Pakula made was to center “President’s Men” less around the broader scandal and more on the uncertain dynamic between Woodward (Redford) and Bernstein (co-star Dustin Hoffman). As Woodward, he’s understated, calculated, calm even, as he slowly grows to understand the enormity of the story he’s unfurling. He’s refreshingly bereft of histrionics; his Woodward is a steady hand who takes in information with stoic stillness, even as the newsroom around him erupts in chaos. Just watch him in one of the film’s most infamous scenes, as Pakula holds on Redford for a solid six minutes as he makes call after call, chasing down sources. Each victory, each setback (even calling sources by the wrong name), each small nudge toward the truth comes through on Redford’s face. And when he finally gets what he needs, he slams the phone down and just starts typing. That’s the commitment to process that Pakula and Redford embody so effortlessly.For all of Redford’s megawatt star power, a role like Woodward demands the kind of understatement that other actors of his stripe would evade in favor of Ruffalo-ian histrionics. This kind of movie needs Redford’s particular brand of integrity, and he helped make journalism look sexy for decades to come. – Clint WorthingtonNow streaming on: Powered byJustWatch