Redford

A river runs through it but nothing happens in it.Robert Redford's beautiful but meandering "A River Runs Through It" is WASP storytelling at its most muted and muffled. It's a movie that never truly becomes a movie, hiding its interesting story behind a torrent of language derived sentence by long sentence from the source novel by Norman Maclean.Only when the movie devolves to its most passionate subject -- men hunting fish in the cold waters of a rushing Montana torrent -- does it achieve a fluency and an immediacy.

When film star Robert Redford was starting the Sundance Festival in Utah in the late 1970s, there were times when he felt like a barker outside a seedy nightclub. "Sundance was a rocky road, and there were a lot of near-fatalities along the way," Redford told about 1,000 arts administrators who gathered in Baltimore this weekend for the half-century summit of the advocacy group Americans for the Arts. "When the festival started, it was just me and two other people. We had one theater, and I'd stand by the front door and urge people to give us a try. I felt like a man who works in a strip joint saying, 'Why don't you come on in?

Oh, how important are the little things.For years the phone rings and one picks it up to hear: "Is this Stephen Hunter? Please hold for Mr. Big."The seconds pass. Eventually, out of some telephonic ether, from a place where time doesn't exist, Mr. Big himself comes on, unruffled, unbothered, only slightly aware that the person holding the phone at your end registers on the radar of humanity.This time, however, the old horn goes jingle-jangle, and when a reporter picks it up, he hears the incredible: "Steve . . . Bob Redford."

Even when Robert Redford was a new-style superstar, he was old-school in the way he maintained his privacy. He brought a cool, laconic electricity to American movie acting and maintained a public reticence to match. He espoused causes without bullying his listeners or inserting his life too far into the national conversation. He has always advocated for the arts straight from the heart. But as he displayed in a recent interview with The Baltimore Sun, he's now willing to reveal more of himself to help an aesthetic crusade.

"Sneakers" is actually about a fabled icon from the bottom of a cereal box in everybody's lost childhood: a Captain Jack Secret Decoder Ring. Except that this Captain Jack Secret Decoder Ring is a little black box; with it, one can penetrate all the"Sneakers" is actually about a fabled icon from the bottom of a cereal box in everybody's lost childhood: a Captain Jack Secret Decoder Ring. Except that this Captain Jack Secret Decoder Ring is a little black box; with it, one can penetrate all the computer codes known to man, and in our computerized age, that's very much the key to the kingdom.

An Unfinished Life is your basic Lasse Hallstrom formula-film, featuring people in dire situations who are redeemed when their basic goodness comes to the fore, elevated a notch by a pair of actors displaying sides we don't often see. That would be Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez, playing a grizzled rancher so enveloped by bitterness that it's a wonder he can even function and an impoverished single mother struggling to overcome the bad choices she...

The Last Castle is a pea-brained dinosaur of a movie, big and stupid and lumbering. It's a mishmash of The Bridge on the River Kwai, From Here to Eternity and The Great Escape, with everything complex and entertaining siphoned off. Robert Redford stars as a three-star Army general who embodies all military virtues except obedience. His disregard for orders and his leadership of a disastrous overseas raid land him in a military prison run by a colonel, James Gandolfini. This warden is the general's opposite: a martinet who demands total control of his inmates and achieves it by any means necessary, including murder.

Kidnapped Robert Redford, above, needs his wits to save him in The Clearing (8:15 p.m.-10 p.m., Cinemax).

Thomas Murton, the Arkansas prisons chief who was the inspiration for the Robert Redford movie "Brubaker," died Oct. 10 of cancer at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City. He was 62. Mr. Murton advocated treating prisoners with respect, and he opposed the death penalty. He rose to prominence as head of Cummins State Prison in Arkansas in the 1960s. Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller appointed him head of the prison system in 1967. Mr. Redford's 1980 role in "Brubaker" as a reform-minded prisons chief who gets little support from his state's political establishment was loosely based on Mr. Murton's career in Arkansas.

On July 8, 2005, MAURICE B. Friends may call at the FAMILY OWNED MARCH FUNERAL HOME EAST, 1101 East North Avenue, on Tuesday 8:30 A.M. to 8 P.M. Funeral Services will take place on Friday at Mc Cormick Chapel, in Redford, NC. See www.marchfh.com

The Sundance Kid himself will be among the slew of glitterati stopping off in Baltimore next month to speak at the annual convention for Americans for the Arts. Robert Redford is among a roster of famous folk including filmmaker John Waters, avant-garde theater and opera director Peter Sellars, and blog founder Arianna Huffington scheduled to attend the convention sponsored by the advocacy group, Americans for the Arts, from June 24-27. Unfortunately, fans will have to be content with spotting the stars from the distance.

TODAY, WHILE many are out returning gifts or catching year-end bargains, let's muse on Robert Redford's words in his most recent Sundance catalog of merchandise: "Holidays again. Forgive me while I dodge the rumble of the million-footed throngs that have succumbed to the marketing ether for Christmas and its days. Can we, without disappointing the children and others who long for the surprise of gift giving, just look to a different value to digest?" One might say -- if in a jaundiced mood -- that this is a little holier-than-thou, appearing in a catalog of things to buy!

SO, shall we expect to see Tom Cruise, his business partner Paula Wagner, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep yukking it up in costume and singing silly songs, in the wake of the disappointing opening of Lions for Lambs? Well, Miss Streep has just completed the movie version of Broadway's Mamma Mia! so there are colorful clothes and ABBA tunes galore in her future. I don't know that Tom, Paula or Redford are quite so lucky. They all had a lot of high hopes riding on Lions for Lambs, it being the initial Cruise/Wagner project out of their United Artists deal, and it is Redford's first directorial effort in seven years.

AN UNFINISHED LIFE / / Miramax / $29.95 A bitter dad. A hot mom. A plucky kid. A wise friend. A bad boyfriend. A good cop. And a 500-pound bear. Introducing the cast of An Unfinished Life, director Lasse Hallstrom's story of family and forgiveness set on a Wyoming ranch. It stars Robert Redford -- finally looking his age -- and Morgan Freeman, who would be worth watching if he were just filling up his car. Retired rancher Einar Gilkyson (Redford) is still grieving the death of his son when his daughter-in-law (Jennifer Lopez)

"To the outside world, it's a big fat market where you have people like Paris Hilton going to parties. ... I think the festival is close to being out of control." Robert Redford commenting on how the Sundance Film Fes tival has changed since he cre ated it AP quoting Newsweek

Kidnapped Robert Redford, above, needs his wits to save him in The Clearing (8:15 p.m.-10 p.m., Cinemax).

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The remains of 18 people -- apparently left as they fell during an altercation at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt -- may shed light on the last days of the Old Kingdom, according to a Pennsylvania State University researcher. "Several texts suggest that some kind of upheaval resulting in civil disorder occurred at the end of the Old Kingdom," says Donald B. Redford, professor of classics and ancient Mediterranean studies. "Until now, there has been no archaeological evidence of these events."

An Unfinished Life is your basic Lasse Hallstrom formula-film, featuring people in dire situations who are redeemed when their basic goodness comes to the fore, elevated a notch by a pair of actors displaying sides we don't often see. That would be Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez, playing a grizzled rancher so enveloped by bitterness that it's a wonder he can even function and an impoverished single mother struggling to overcome the bad choices she...