Space Cowboys is Clint Eastwood's farewell to summer blockbusters

Clint Eastwood has been directing and occasionally starring in fall movies for the better part of the past quarter-century. Almost everything he’s made since 2003’s Mystic River has been released in that awards-movie corridor between September and late December, and even when the movies themselves didn’t turn out to be Oscar projects, they tended to have an elegiac, autumnal tone befitting a filmmaker so attuned to the nuances of aging, regrets, and American tragedy. But in his (relative) youth, Clint Eastwood used to make summer movies — popular entertainments in the pre-superhero era. In keeping with his later-period tendency toward movies that work as farewells to genres, historical eras, and himself, his August 2000 film Space Cowboys feels, with 25 years of hindsight, like his farewel