There is an astonishing, bewilderingly brutal attack on Clint Eastwood’s directorial work in Alex Cox’s embittered piece on “actors who direct” in Guardian Film and Music.

I can fully understand the frustration a talented helmer like Cox feels at Kirsten Dunst and Gary Oldman being given cash to direct films because they are big names, whilst Cox himself can’t get finance for a cup of coffee, but his judgement on this occasion is frankly bizarre.

It’s absolutely wrong (and exceptionally lazy) to suggest that every decent shot Eastwood ever printed was stolen from Siegel or Leone, for example, when Eastwood has harnessed in a wholly imperceptible way the visual brilliance of those directors (amongst others like Ford, Mann, Ozu…) whilst infusing his films with a humanism that Leone never had and Siegel never even attempted. Witness the scene between Kevin Costner and the black father in A Perfect World, Eastwood and the cut prostitute in Unforgiven, Robbins and Penn on the front step in Mystic River, Swank and her family in Million Dollar Baby and native american actor Adam Beach’s entire performance in Flags of our Fathers. Cox is so far off understanding what Cinema (other than his own) is capable of, that he’s coming across as a Baz Bamigboye ignoramus. Shame.