Walt Kowalski, a retired mechanic, spends his days busy with home repairs, beer, and monthly visits to the barber.

Although the last wish of his deceased wife was to confess, for Walt, an embittered veteran of the Korean War to keep his M-1 rifle clean and ready, there is nothing to confess. And they have no one to trust it enough, you just need his dog Daisy.

All the people once called neighbors have moved or died, “neighbors” actually are Hmong immigrants who despises.

Suffered from almost everything he sees (the eaves fallen, weed the gardens and the foreign faces around him, gangs of teenagers Hmong, Latino and African-Americans who think no way is his neighborhood, his children are now some immature strangers), until one night someone tries to steal his car Gran Torino.

The Gran Torino, still bright as that day, decades ago, when the Walt helped it left the assembly line, got into his life to his shy young neighbor Thao (Bee Vang), when they pressured the Hmong gangs guy trying to steal it.

But Walt got into the robbery and became the reluctant hero of the neighborhood, especially for Thao’s mother and her older sister, Sue (Ahney Her), who insist that work for Walt Thao to see if you straightened. While initially not want to have anything to do with those people, Walt finally relents and puts the boy to work fixing the district, establishing an unlikely friendship that will change the lives of both.

I shall eat the next person who tells me that Angelina Jolie cannot act. Starring as Collins, she is the entire, anxious point of Eastwood’s film, and absolutely terrific as a mother who is forcibly reunited with the wrong boy by a Los Angeles Police Department rotten to the core. The high and mighty — namely Mayor George E. Cryer and Police Chief James “Two Guns” Davis (played by Colm Feore) — have an almost psychopathic desire to create good news so that their shoddy house-of-cards empire doesn’t fall around their ears. This being prewar LA you can’t turn a corner without Clint reading you a chapter from Hollywood Babylon. Read L’Echange

There is, though, one old-school superstar who pulled it off without too much of a hitch. Where Eastwood waited for age to make him suitable for Unforgiven, and then slipped back into pretending he was far younger, Paul Newman recognised the passing of time, chose his roles carefully and stuck to his guns. Thus he’s the only pretty-boy screen-god to have retained the absolute respect of critics and public alike. This is why he was Sam Mendes’ first choice to play gangster John Rooney in Road To Perdition – because he would be wholly on the ball and not the least bit overshadowed by the presence of Tom Hanks or next-generation pretty-boy Jude Law. Indeed, they’d be more concerned that he would blow THEM off the screen. Read Biography Paul Newman