As China’s spies grow more aggressive, the FBI is distracted and off-balance.

Star of Hollywood classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, dies aged 89 * ‘The star who changed Hollywood’: Peter Bradshaw on Robert Redford * Robert Redford – a life in pictures Back in 2019, Ryan Gilbey set about ranking Redford’s top ten performances. As always with Ranked, positioning and omissions are supposed to spark debate (or ignite endless arguing. Should Indecent Proposal have been excluded from the top ten? Was All the President’s Men only worthy of fourth place? The debate continues. Here’s Ryan’s number one entry, the aforementioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Redford’s sole Oscar nomination for acting was, rather shockingly, for The Sting, a complacent 1973 con-man comedy. But it was his first pairing with Sting co-star Paul Newman that distils the performer’s essence. Although the movie is unable to fess up to its bromantic longings – did any woman in a buddy movie ever look more like a gooseberry than poor Katharine Ross? – it’s still worth seeing for Redford’s sunny charm. Even then, it seemed to trouble him faintly, as though he was worried we might take him for a himbo. The studio did. “He’s just another California blond,” said one executive. “Throw a stick out of a window in Malibu, you’ll hit six like him.” But Newman helped win him the part. Redford got a shock when he saw the first cut. “I said: ‘What the hell is that song doing in there? Raindrops? It’s not even raining. On a bicycle?’” Continue reading...