Rob Reiner

1987 · Rob Reiner · 98 min · Fantasy / Adventure / Comedy

The Princess Bride is that rare film where the satire and the sincerity coexist without canceling each other out. It mocks fairy tale conventions while delivering a fairy tale that actually works, carried by a cast firing on every cylinder and a script that never wastes a line. The framing device occasionally interrupts momentum, and the production values show their age, but nothing about this movie has lost a step in nearly four decades. It was made for everyone, and it still plays that way.

1986 · Rob Reiner · 89 min · Drama, Coming-of-Age

Four boys walk along railroad tracks to find a dead body, and what they actually find is the end of their childhood, told with a tenderness and honesty that makes it the best coming-of-age film of its generation.

1990 · Rob Reiner · 107 min · Thriller / Horror

Misery locks a bestselling novelist in a farmhouse bedroom with his self-declared number one fan, and out of that single room Rob Reiner builds one of the most suffocating thrillers ever adapted from Stephen King. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for Annie Wilkes, a performance that pivots from chirpy devotion to homicidal wrath without ever losing the wounded human underneath, and James Caan does heroic work from a bed. The hobbling scene alone secured the film's place in thriller history. Three decades on, it remains the gold standard for two-person psychological warfare.

1992 · Rob Reiner · 138 min · Drama / Legal

A Few Good Men is the courtroom drama as heavyweight bout, building for two hours toward a witness-stand collision between Tom Cruise's slick Navy lawyer and Jack Nicholson's granite colonel that produced the most quoted eruption in the genre's history. Aaron Sorkin's first produced screenplay crackles with the rhythms that would define his career, Rob Reiner directs it like a thriller, and the ensemble around the leads never misses. It's formula, gleaming and unashamed, with a female lead the script underserves and a mystery that's really a straight line. Nobody minds while it's playing.