The Subtle Auteur: Rob Reiner
Rob Reiner was a filmmaker so unconfined by stylistic authorship that he made some of the best films of all time.
Few directors can claim as many cinematic tentpoles as Rob Reiner. The recently deceased filmmaker and his collaborators defined entire genres in breathtakingly funny, earnest, emotionally rich, and intensely quotable films.
Working with Christopher Guest on This is Spinal Tap (1984), he made the foundational mockumentary and set the template for Guest’s later directorial efforts, including Best in Show (2000). He worked with future West Wing creator and The Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin on the now-iconic 1992 courtroom drama A Few Good Men and later The American President (1995). Reiner brought Stephen King to the screen as director successfully not once but twice (a remarkable feat in itself) with the coming-of-age drama Stand by Me (1986), from King’s novella The Body, and the psychological horror film Misery (1990, from the novel of the same name), in which he directed an Oscar-winning Kathy Bates to a performance that helped set the template for modern horror acting. The current romantic comedy can be traced in part back to Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally… (1989), written by genre icon Nora Ephron (director of films like 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle and 1998’s You’ve Got Mail). And working with legendary novelist, screenwriter, and script doctor William Goldman, Reiner gave us 1987’s immortal fairy tale The Princess Bride (Goldman also wrote Reiner’s aforementioned Misery).
Much has been made of this series of films between 1984’s This is Spinal Tap and 1992’s A Few Good Men. These films are not only brilliant; they’re a stretch of work unparalleled in their branding upon the cinemagoing brain and the moviemaking field. Reiner managed a marriage of easygoing pop enthusiasm with bold emotional registers, and in the way his work is both exceedingly fun to watch and unnaturally rewarding to revisit, he stands with a very small pantheon of film artists.
This year, I saw what would become Reiner’s final film, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025). In this legacy sequel to This is Spinal Tap, I found a kind of subtle irony befitting Reiner’s legacy. When the dust settles around the current age of late-stage sequels, I think Spinal Tap II will prove definitive in its own right: a somewhat sad, too-late-to-matter sequel about somewhat sad, too-late-to-matter rock stars straining for relevance in a crowded field, an unintentionally ouroboric exercise in mirroring its subject.
Through it all, there’s Rob Reiner as filmmaker Marty DiBergi. That his directorial career is bookended by performances as the behatted documentary filmmaker — first as a newcomer director cutting his teeth on this rockumentary, last as a filmmaker staking a comeback on what amounts to the same rockumentary over again — feels like it means something. But then, everything about Reiner’s life and work meant something.