Director: Rian Johnson

Rian Johnson began with Brick, a high school film shot in hardboiled detective grammar with Chandler dialogue coming out of teenagers, made for almost nothing. The willingness to impose one genre’s rules on another material has continued through everything since.

Looper, The Last Jedi and the Knives Out films all set up an expectation and then refuse it. The Last Jedi remains the most divisive Star Wars film, largely because it treats legacy and inheritance as things to be questioned.

Knives Out revived the whodunit commercially and gave the form a modern class politics it had usually avoided.