One of Eastwood's most pleasing character studies since Million Dollar Baby.

The latest of Eastwood’s many potential swan songs, this sketch of a movie is transparent enough to focus all of your attention on the shadow imagery behind it. On the brimmed silhouette that its director and star cuts in a door frame, on the six pounds of gravel that it sounds like he gargled before every take, and on the way that he plays Mike as a man who would give anything for a place to hang his hat if only he could bring himself to take it off his head. Better late than never.

There is a craggy kind of elegance to Cry Macho. You know what you’re getting for the most part. This does not include a lot of surprises. It does include comfort in the familiar. Eastwood has earned that, too.

A road movie that, considering who made it, starts pretty far down that road, Cry Macho is familiar and loose, sometimes rattly, occasionally wince-inducing, and in a few moments genuine in ways no one else seems to know how to do anymore.

It’s friendly and diverting and formulaic, in an inoffensive and good-natured way, and it’s a totally minor affair.