Director: Gore Verbinski

Gore Verbinski directed The Ring, the American remake that made Japanese horror a commercial category in the West, and then three Pirates of the Caribbean films that turned a theme park ride into a franchise nobody had predicted.

His action has a comic architecture, closer to silent film than to modern blockbusters. The sword fight on a rolling waterwheel in Dead Man’s Chest is choreographed as a Buster Keaton sequence.

Rango won Best Animated Feature and is the strangest thing he has made, a Western about identity with a chameleon in the lead.