In other words. Directors who have made particularly good movies, and also particularly bad movies.
Joel Schumacker. Good: Falling Down, Lost Boys, 8mm. Bad: Batman & Robin, Batman Forever.
Does anyone know why a proven director made such utter tosh as those batman movies?
John Frankenheimer made many brilliant films (the original Manchurian Candidate, Seconds), but he also made Reindeer Games.
Can’t speak for Schumacher, didn’t catch either of his Batman films.
I’d have to nominate Sergio Leone. And I think his range is displayed in one film.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Such magnificent casting and characterization. A well laid out story, cleverly constructed scenes, beautiful cinematography,haunting music.
One of my favs, bordering on brilliance but…
The overdubbing of the Italian actors brings it all down a few notches. Why couldn’t he use American extras for speaking parts?
Cheeseball and magnificence from one man.
Not to mention Prophecy .Stanley Kubrick–how do you go from “Dr. Strangelove” and “A Clockwork Orange” to “Eyes Wide Shit” (and that’s not a typo!)
Ridley Scott. Good: Alien, Bladerunner, Black Hawk Down, and many others. Bad: G. I. Jane, Hannibal.
J. Lee Thompson – The man directed Taras Bulba, Kings of the Sun , and —
The Guns of Navarone
But he also directed
**The White Buffalo
King Solomon’s Mines** (The awful Richard Chamberlain/Sharon Stone version)
Firewalker (the movie that proved that Chuck Norris shouldn’t attempt comedy. Nor should Lou Gossettt, Jr. Or J. Lee Thompson, for that matter)
To be fair, he made awful movies at the same time he was making good ones (John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!. And one of his early films was an Alligator named Daisy. I’ve never seen it, but I can’t believe it was good.
Oliver Stone. He directed Platoon, one of my favorite films. Yet Stone also churned out Any Given Sunday and, even worse, last year’s Alexander.
Roman Polanski followed up What? with Chinatown, going from botton-of-the-barrel to film classic without anything inbetween.
He also directed Michae Caine in The Hand Yecccch!
Brian De Palma is another one. “The Untouchables,” “Carlito’s Way,” and “Hi Mom” are all good-to-great films. De Palma’s made a bunch of incredible clunkers, my favorite example of this being “Body Double,” one of the most irritating pictures I’ve ever seen.
At the risk of stating the obvious:
Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Jaws; on the other hand, AI, Minority Report, The Terminal, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. 
Don’t forget “1941”!
Hang on a sec…
Can we name a director whose every film was great or even good? (Except for Hitchcock, of course.)
I can’t think of a Steven Soderbergh movie I’ve seen and disliked.
I can.
I think Francis Ford Coppola is the poster boy for this thread. His 70’s work is so great then it went downhill from Apocalypse Now. I won’t even include One From the Heart and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in his list of crap films, at least he was trying to do something interesting.
But it’s disheartening to see Jack, The Rainmaker and especially Godfather III on his resume.
John McTiernan: Good - Predator, Die Hard, Thomas Crown Affair.
Bad - Basic, Rollerball, Medicine Man
EZ
I think Soderbergh hasn’t really made anything HORRIBLE, but he might be worth listing just for Ocean’s Twelve. 11 was a fun crime caper and 12 was just 90 minutes of celebrity masturbation.
Also, I only saw Kafka once years ago, but I remember it being really boring. Not ENTIRELY terrible though. Oh, and Solaris? Didn’t see it, but I suspect it might be pretty high up on the crappy movie scale.
I guarantee Soderbergh will belong on this list for sure within a few years at this rate.
I think he watched the Tim Burton versions, and then the campy 60s TV series, and in his mind combined them, so when he came to working out the style sensibility he wanted to emulate he got all mixed up and took the worst elements from each, instead of the best. Batman Forever actually wasn’t that awful, though it is very much flawed, and again he misread what deemed it popular, and amped up all the worst aspects of it about ten more notches for Batman and Robin.
Basically, his sensibilities were way off base and nobody reigned him in.
How about Robert Altman?
At his best he’s capable of Nashville, 3 Women, and Mash and then, 30 years later, Gosford Park and Cookie’s Fortune.
Conversely, this is the same guy who gave us Quintet and Popeye - utter dreck!