Steven Spielberg is a true master of the filmmaking craft. His breakout movie, Jaws, reshaped the entire film industry. Hollywood studios have spent the last half-century trying to recapture the success of Spielberg’s Hitchcockian shark thriller. Everything Spielberg touches turns to genre gold. Raiders of the Lost Ark is the ultimate action-adventure movie. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the ultimate UFO movie. Saving Private Ryan is the ultimate war movie. Jurassic Park is the ultimate monster movie.
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The director continues to experiment with genre to this day. Last year, he directed his first musical with a dazzling, deeply cinematic remake of West Side Story that was praised as an improvement over its widely adored predecessor.
Since he burst onto the indie scene in the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino has become one of the most prominent figures in genre cinema. After kicking off his career with a trio of stylish crime thrillers – his nonlinear heist caper Reservoir Dogs, his darkly comedic anthology Pulp Fiction, and his underappreciated Elmore Leonard adaptation Jackie Brown – Tarantino started experimenting with different genre frameworks. His two-part action epic Kill Bill rolled a handful of different genres into one: it’s a martial arts movie, a blaxploitation movie, and a spaghetti western rolled into one – with an anime segment thrown in for good measure.
Tarantino always does something truly inventive with his chosen genre frameworks. Death Proof is a carsploitation movie crossed with a slasher movie about a sadistic stunt driver who kills young women with his “death-proof” car. Inglourious Basterds is a World War II movie that’s daring enough to kill off Adolf Hitler in satirically inaccurate fashion. Django Unchained is a spaghetti western set in the antebellum South about a slave-turned-bounty hunter.
On Brett Goldstein’s Films To Be Buried With podcast, Rob Reiner is regularly cited as the most underrated director of all time. Reiner got his start as an actor on the seminal sitcom All in the Family, but he later took up the director’s chair to call the shots on his own projects. His films are often included on lists of the greatest ever made, but Reiner himself doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Not only has Reiner directed a bunch of universally loved movie classics; they’re from a wide range of diverse genres.
Stand by Me is a masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre. When Harry Met Sally is a masterpiece of the romantic comedy genre. Misery is a masterpiece of the psychological horror genre. The Princess Bride is a masterpiece of the fantasy adventure genre (and a delightfully self-aware one at that). This is Spinal Tap is not only a masterpiece of the mockumentary genre, but one of the early entries that defined the genre in the first place. Reiner has directed a bunch of solid movies in a bunch of different genres.
Ridley Scott’s first couple of major directorial efforts belonged to the science fiction genre, but they each carve out a niche as the very best of a specific sci-fi subgenre. Alien brought the visceral terror of a haunted house movie to a spaceship, while Blade Runner brought the high-contrast lighting and hard-boiled detective stories of the film noir to a futuristic metropolis.
Since then, Scott has helmed masterfully crafted movies in a ton of different genres. He combined a buddy road trip movie with a crime caper in Thelma & Louise. He revived the swords-and-sandals genre with Gladiator. He brought the intensity of contemporary warfare to life in Black Hawk Down. Last year alone, he directed a bleak medieval drama and a darkly comic tale of murder and betrayal in a fashion dynasty.
Every time Stanley Kubrick tried his hand at a different movie genre, he ended up delivering one of the all-time greatest entries in that genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. Paths of Glory is one of the greatest war movies of all time. The Killing is one of the greatest heist films of all time. Kubrick took audiences back in time to the 18th century in his every-frame-a-painting masterpiece Barry Lyndon and took them forward in time to a dystopian near-future in his chilling Anthony Burgess adaptation A Clockwork Orange.
Kubrick even directed two masterpieces of the most instinctual genres: comedy and horror. Dr. Strangelove is one of the funniest and most timeless political satires ever made. Its incisive, bittersweet storytelling captured the contemporary Cold War climate and remains just as biting and relevant today. And The Shining is one of the most terrifying horror films ever made. Its unsettling imagery and ambiguous meaning make it a hauntingly mesmerizing experience. No matter how many times a given viewer watches The Shining, they can never make sense of it. Most filmmakers who dedicate their entire careers to either comedy or horror couldn’t hope to make a movie as great as Dr. Strangelove or The Shining.
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