Jake Kasdan

Linda Cardellini takes a moment to decide how Lindsay Weir should respond in Freaks and Geeks (1999), and Kasdan lets the uncertainty remain on her face. He does not insist that every reaction explain itself, which gives the young actors room to make school life uncomfortable without making it false. We worried about Lindsay because Cardellini makes the effort of choosing how to behave so painfully visible. The pace sometimes drags, but we would rather have that extra hesitation than a brisker scene that loses what she is doing.

His debut as writer-director, Zero Effect (1998), was a detective comedy; the later Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), co-written with Judd Apatow, parodied music biopics. Studio comedies such as Bad Teacher (2011) and Sex Tape (2014) came next, before the shift into large-scale action. It is a progression that makes his patient television direction easy to overlook. We want him to keep watching what his actors are doing, even when there is more happening around them.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) shows why the move into action need not be a mistake. Kasdan gives Dwayne Johnson a joke he can play against himself, rather than expecting his presence to be amusing on its own. The video-game premise supplies an opportunity for performance, and the film keeps its attention on character.

Red One (2024) forgets it, putting Johnson's North Pole security chief alongside Chris Evans's hired tracker and waiting for chemistry that never arrives. The kidnapping of Santa provides plenty of business, but the elves with earpieces are too mild a joke to sustain this Christmas action-comedy. J.K. Simmons gives Santa some welcome warmth, yet Kasdan cannot get comparable life into the central pairing. We found the result dispiriting because a film about saving Christmas appears to take more interest in its security arrangements. For a first encounter with Kasdan, we would choose Freaks and Geeks and allow for the occasional slow stretch.