MWB wrote:How does one judge the director of a film? Overall flow of a movie?
A lot of factors to consider. I think some of the time a lot of the credit that people give solely to directors should really be somewhat shared with editors or cinematographers. Or even the Special Effects teams (what up, Life of Pi).
For me, the biggest things are, how well does the movie capture the scope it wishes to present? Is the director's vision clear, and did they achieve what they were trying to say, if anything (for instance, the LoTR movies certainly have a great epic feel to them, which they were clearly going for). Also, flow and sense as it pertains to plot is a big one, especially since directors technically have final say on the screenplay (for example, Alexander Payne re-wrote the majority of Bob Nelson's script for Nebraska).
A big one I feel like largely overlooked for some reason is, how good is the acting in the movie? How do the scenes develop? The main purpose of the director, when it all comes down to it, is to "direct" the actors and the scenes. Now, obviously all actors are not created equal, but it's usually not a coincidence when you look at a good director's work and find that the majority of the performances in them are uniformly excellent (again, Alex Payne comes to mind, since I think he's one of the best in this regard working right now, even if his films on the whole are a varying degree of quality). Obviously that's not the end-all be-all in judging the direction of a movie, but it is important.
It does bug me sometimes when people are raving about a particular performance, but there's nary a mention of the director. The best recent example I can come up for this is The Theory of Everything, where you have an actor in Eddie Redmayne who by and large has put in mediocre work in his career this far, turning in a very good performance. You gotta give the director some credit there too.
Edit: and yeah. Basically what Tif said -- he's more concise anyway.
