TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Comedy, Romantic Comedy, Coming-of-Age, Drama, Romance, Road Movie
Key Collaborators: Robert Leighton (Editor), Marc Shaiman (Composer), Andrew Scheinman (Producer), Christopher Guest (Leading Character Actor), Lily Kilvert (Production Designer), Billy Crystal (Character Actor), Jack Nicholson (Leading Actor), Anthony Edwards (Leading Actor), William Goldman (Screenwriter), Aaron Sorkin (Screenwriter), Alan Greisman (Producer), Barry Sonnenfeld (Cinematographer)

"Rob Reiner's career as a director has been highly successful, both commercially and critically, starting with the cult classic rock-mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap (1984). His film output has fallen off in recent years, in both quantity and quality, as he has become a high-profile political advocate. Reiner was born the son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, and has directed an impressive string of hit romantic comedies and dramas." - Wm. Scott Whited (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"Yet to establish a consistent style, Robert Reiner is nonetheless one of the most promising directors of film comedy to emerge from America in recent years… Reiner has established himself both as an expert director of actors, and as a comic artist whose attitude towards his characters is warm but never patronising. His touch is unusually light and unassertive - qualities too often absent from contemporary mainstream comedy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)

"As a director, he made an auspicious debut with This is Spinal Tap (1984) - a spoof documentary about a non-existent rock group so persuasive that you almost believed they were real. There seemed no genre he could not tackle - the youth picture (Stand by Me, 1986), the fairy tale (The Princess Bride, 1987), comedy (When Harry Met Sally…), horror (Misery, 1996) and the courtroom drama (A Few Good Men, 1992). Since then, however, his career has stalled." - The Movie Book, 1999

"If Reiner’s facility as a comic gives him great abilities of observation, its negative side is that his career has been by and large a series of very skillful imitations of other directors and other styles. In this context, it is hard to think of Reiner as a major Hollywood artist, no matter how successful his films. Indeed, Reiner would have made an extraordinary director at the heyday of the studio system, taking on the A-assignments with dazzling ability. So if Reiner has not yet demonstrated himself to be an auteur—like Woody Allen, with whom he has been compared, or like David Lynch, who seems a polar opposite—he is definitely a metteur en scene, like Sydney Lumet, Norman Jewison, or Sydney Pollack." - Charles Derry (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991)

“Rob Reiner, after his stint as Michael Stivic on the Norman Lear TV sitcom All in the Family, has evolved as a sensitive, insightful director of such films as This is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), and When Harry Met Sally (1989).” - The Encyclopedia of Hollywood, 2004

"As a director, he seemed more struck (or poleaxed) by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a pretty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky with “good” and “bad” all too clearly labeled. He’s carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play. But his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy—that if we’re good to our kids everything will be okay. This is not true. Life is more interesting." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)