Directors who have turned up more than once

A few of the names behind the puzzles have come up more than once, and once you know a director's habits that turns into a clue of its own. The director is only the third thing the game hands you, but you can often get there earlier off the look of a film or the kind of story it is telling. Here are the directors with more than one answer to their name, by number.

#0024 and #0047 are both Christopher Nolan, and both are built from real history. The first, from 2017, is his recreation of the 1940 evacuation of around 338,000 Allied troops from an exposed French beach, told across three timelines that run at different speeds, with a score built around the tick of a watch. It was made for a reported hundred million dollars, took more than five hundred million worldwide, and won three Oscars, for editing and sound. The second, from 2023, is the three-hour account of the physicist who led the building of the first atomic bomb and was later stripped of his security clearance for opposing the hydrogen bomb. It won seven Oscars including Best Picture and gave Nolan his own first award for directing, after more than a decade of nominations. He shoots on large-format film rather than digital and likes to break time apart and let the pieces meet at the end, so a frame that looks shot on real stock, with a deliberately scrambled structure, is worth his name before the clue confirms it.

#0040 and #0054 are Quentin Tarantino, and they run off the same template: revenge told in named chapters that appear on screen, and long, talky scenes that tip without warning into violence. The first, from 2003, follows a former assassin, played by Uma Thurman, who wakes from a coma and works down a list of the people who left her for dead. It is a feature-length tribute to the kung-fu, samurai and spaghetti-western films Tarantino grew up on, and it took around a hundred and eighty million dollars worldwide on the strength of that style. The long fight in the House of Blue Leaves was so bloody that he shot part of it in black and white and silhouette to slip it past the American ratings board. It divided people on exactly that, the sheer volume of stylised violence, and on his choice to split the story so that the emotional payoff waited for a second film.

The second, from 2009, moves to Nazi-occupied France, where a cinema owner and a squad of Allied soldiers separately set out to trap the German high command inside a burning picture house. It was Tarantino's highest-grossing film to that point, at around three hundred and twenty million dollars, and it earned eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, winning one of them for Christoph Waltz. Waltz played the courteous and monstrous SS officer hunting the people in hiding, and the part swept the whole season for him, Cannes, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, the SAG award and the Oscar, turning an actor barely known outside Europe into a star overnight. The film runs on tension more than action, and its long opening interrogation on a French dairy farm is taught as a lesson in how to hold a scene. The ending, which rewrites history and kills Hitler in a burning cinema, still splits audiences between those who find it a thrilling revenge fantasy and those who find it too glib for the subject.

Steven Spielberg sits behind three of the answers so far. #0008, from 1981, is the adventure about a globe-trotting archaeologist, played by Harrison Ford, racing Nazi agents to a biblical relic, from a story by George Lucas. It was the highest-grossing film of its year, took more than three hundred and fifty million dollars, and won five Oscars from eight nominations, all in technical categories, losing Best Picture to a British running drama. It more or less set the template for the modern action-adventure, and the character went on to four more films. The moment everyone remembers, where Ford simply shoots a swordsman who is showing off with his blade, was improvised on the day, because Ford had dysentery and could not face filming a long choreographed fight.

#0057, from 2005, is his version of the H. G. Wells alien invasion, with Tom Cruise as an ordinary dockworker trying to keep his two children alive as towering machines rise out of the ground and level everything around them. It made more than six hundred million dollars and was one of the biggest films of that year, and it earned three Oscar nominations for its effects and sound without winning any. Critics admired the craft, the relentless sense of dread and the way it channelled the fear of the years just after the September 11 attacks, with its falling ash and its walls of missing-person flyers. What almost nobody defended was the ending. The invaders, faithful to the book, are undone by ordinary earthly bacteria rather than by anything the humans manage to do, which lands as a let-down after two hours of terror, and the tidy reveal that the teenage son has somehow survived a battle he walked straight into struck many people as a sentimental cheat bolted onto an otherwise bleak film. It is often held up as a technically brilliant piece of work undone by its final ten minutes.

He also produced #0004, the ten-part war series, with Tom Hanks. Across all of them Spielberg puts an ordinary person at the centre of something enormous and keeps the camera on a frightened face rather than the spectacle behind it, which is a habit worth watching for.

#0003 and #0019 both come from Vince Gilligan, and the second grew straight out of the first. #0003, from 2008, is the drama about a mild-mannered high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who, handed a terminal diagnosis, starts cooking methamphetamine and hardens over five seasons into a ruthless drug lord. Gilligan pitched it as turning its lead from Mr Chips into Scarface. It became one of the most decorated dramas in television history, winning sixteen Emmys, four of them for Bryan Cranston as the teacher, three for Aaron Paul and two for Anna Gunn, and it took the award for best drama in each of its last two years. Its second-to-last episode is regularly named among the finest single hours ever made, and it managed the thing so many celebrated shows fumble, an ending that satisfied almost everyone who had followed it.

#0019, from 2015, is the prequel Gilligan built with Peter Gould, following a small-time lawyer, played by Bob Odenkirk, some years before the events of the first show as he slides toward the crooked operator he later becomes, with Rhea Seehorn drawing much of the praise as the woman beside him. It is held to be that rare prequel as good as its parent, and it carries one strange record: it was nominated for fifty-three Emmys and won none of them, more than any programme in history has been nominated without a single win. Odenkirk had a heart attack on set during the final season and recovered to finish it. Both shows are set in the same New Mexico desert and shot with the same taste for wide, empty space and low, odd camera angles, so the look alone points at him.

The last repeat is Andrew Stanton, who directed #0051 and #0023 for Pixar. #0051, from 2003, follows a timid clownfish crossing the ocean to find his captured son, with Ellen DeGeneres voicing the forgetful fish who helps him along. It was the highest-grossing animated film ever made at the time, took around nine hundred and forty million dollars, and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the first Pixar film to do it.

#0023, from 2008, is the near-silent story of a small waste-collecting robot left alone to tidy a rubbish-choked, abandoned Earth, its first half carried by sound and movement with barely a word spoken. Ben Burtt, who built the voice of R2-D2, made its beeps and whirs the same way. It won Best Animated Feature as well and drew six Oscar nominations in all, as many as any animated film had ever managed, and the Los Angeles film critics named it the best picture of the year, the first time that group had given its top prize to a cartoon. Pixar's clean, bright look gives the artwork away early, and from there you are choosing between the handful of Pixar answers rather than the whole catalogue.

Spotting a director is one of the more dependable ways to jump ahead in KINO. The name only lands on the third clue, but the habits show up sooner, in the look of a frame or the kind of story being told, and a director with more than one answer is a name worth remembering.