Posterized: Joe Johnston, a low profile director with a high profile filmography

by Nathaniel R

Joe Johnston behind the scenes on Star Wars (1977) his very first movie in his mid 20s

With the long-gestating The Nutcracker and the Four Realms now in theaters (its initial shoot wrapped nearly two years ago!) it occurred to us to look at the directorial career of Joe Johnston. When the studio opted for a full month of reshoots on The Nutcracker, the original director, Lasse Hallström was unavailable so Johnston stepped in (and now there's a joint "directed by" credit). Johnston is hardly a household name but every time his name pops up we're reminded that a chunk of his filmography is actually fairly famous.

How many of his 10 theatrically-released movies have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

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Review: "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"

by Chris Feil

Yes, Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is another attempt to monetize a familiar property into CGI fantasy excess. This time it is the Tchaikovsky ballet (itself an adaptation of an adaptation) getting the family film treatment, often owing more narratively to its cinematic genre predecessors like Alice in Wonderland and the Narnia movies than its actual source material. While it does fall into the garish trappings of those films, the film gets a good bit more mileage out of not taking itself so straightfaced. Within that familiar framework, the film fascinates by letting itself get a little cuckoo.

Mackenzie Foy is Clara, a young girl mourning the death of her mother, bestowed a mysterious egg-shaped lockbox as a Christmastime dowry. Spiritually guided by her godfather, played by Morgan Freeman In An Eyepatch, she ventures into the fantasy land formerly visited by her mother. But now that wintery world is at war with itself, three of its more upbeat realms against a foggy, mouse-infested one lorded over by Helen Mirren’s Mother Ginger.

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