Largely because most critics have no idea what directors do. As a result, they routinely give directors credit for the work of writers and producers while ignoring the actual direction. I recently came across a perfect example from the New York Times in a review of Cops and Robbers.
Determining who did what in a film can be a challenge, but when a film has one screenwriter, particularly a screenwriter adapting his own novel, the picture's quite a bit clearer. In this case, we have other thematically and stylistically similar works by the author.
Even by 1972, Cops and Robbers was clearly a Westlake story, but when Roger Greenspun reviewed the film, he wrote at length about things found in the script and about the casting and yet the only name he mentioned was the director Aram Avakian (who was involved in neither the writing nor the production).
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