More subtle directors know our memories are not shaped by the top 40, but by the sound coming out of a neighbour's window, the song your first love's mother played non-stop, the tune that a best friend left behind when they moved to another country.
All of which makes you wonder if now might be the perfect time for someone — a subtler director than Gunn, perhaps — to update "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," travelling far into what Thurber, Mitty's creator, called "the remote, intimate airways of his mind".
While burlesque was all about subtle suggestion, directors and the public were getting used to seeing more and more nudity on screen and more graphic sex scenes.
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre received subtler treatment from director Cary Fukunaga in a sharply focused film with persuasive performances by Mia Wasikowska and Fassbender.
Thanks to his vision and the cast and directors' subtle acuity, I understood why every character cared about that race.
"Viewers think they are free to look where they want," Dr. Smith writes, "but, due to the subtle influence of the director and actors, where they want to look is also where the director wants them to look".
He knew Brennan while at the agency and respects the director's "subtle and fair mind".
The subtle simplicity of the director's style perfectly complements the sophistication and sensitivity of the storytelling.
The film's tone is instantly recognizable as a sort of modernist classicism, even as it reflects the director's subtle, spontaneous moods.
Once again, Mr. González Iñárritu's fine and subtle instincts as a director of actors and a composer of shots are undermined by a melodramatic sense of story and a fundamentally sentimental conception of fate.
