Kevin Paul · CC BY 4.0

A filmmaker whose Baltimore pictures, especially Diner, turned ordinary conversation among friends into a genre of its own, wry, specific, unhurried. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for Rain Man (1988), and his range extended from the baseball fable The Natural to the Vietnam comedy Good Morning, Vietnam to the political satire Wag the Dog, which landed with eerie timing. He was still directing decades later, taking on the Hulu miniseries Dopesick in 2021.