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Few directors reach the sort of stardom where their names are thrown on billboards. A Nolan or a Tarantino or a Peele become brands in and of themselves, while the other 99% bubble quietly under the surface; reliable journeymen, gallantly plugging away at the nuts and bolts of what used to be the mid-budget feature scene. These are the filmmakers who not only set the pace, but who change the very language of a genre too, consistently firing out exciting, crowd-pleasing, attention-grabbing stuff, year after year, decade after decade. Creative puppet masters living behind the scenes; their movies aren’t as stylistically loud, but their generation-spanning oeuvres are just as (if not more) legendary.

Don Siegel, J. Lee Thompson, Mary Lambert, Renny Harlin, Jonathan Demme, Doug Liman, John Frankenheimer – even just picking a handful of names at random gives you a who’s-who of filmmakers responsible for some of the most...