GOING FOR EMOTION

The high-tech digital tool kit available to today’s film directors can be a “Pandora’s box,” says veteran director Chris Columbus. “Sometimes, you have this completely CGI world and the audience knows it. I can’t put my finger on how or why they know it, but they just know it.” The key to keeping movies grounded and human, he said, is restraint. “It’s like having a really great steak, and not eating six of them.” The “Pixels” director is not unfamiliar with, or unfriendly toward, visual effects. But his most-famous films as a director are known for an emotional, rather than a computerized, virtuosity:

“ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING” (1987): The title sounds a little lame now – it sounded a little lame then – but anyone who gave Columbus’ directorial debut a shot was in for a delightfully surprising series of hair-raising mishaps and an expedition into late-’80s urban paranoia, as Elisabeth Shue sets out and tries to rescue her runaway friend from a downtown Chicago bus station with three kids in tow.

“HOME ALONE” (1990): Macaulay Culkin was visited upon an unsuspecting world via a potentially nightmarish scenario – a 10-year-old marooned at home for the holidays, while his large family heads off to Paris. But Culkin’s Kevin McCallister certainly made the best of things, ordering pizza, making a mess and thwarting two dastardly house burglars (Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern) who’d hoped to make a Christmastime killing. (Columbus also directed the 1992 sequel.)

“MRS. DOUBTFIRE” (1993): Robin Williams in drag was an acquired taste, but this adaptation of the Anne Fine novel (“Alias Madame Doubtfire”) – in which a divorcing dad is hired as the nanny to his own children – remains one of the late comedian’s more- beloved pictures.

“HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE” (2001): Columbus beat out such directors as Mike Newell, Terry Gilliam and Alan Parker (as well as, reportedly, his onetime mentor Steven Spielberg) to direct the J.K. Rowling blockbuster, which despite being an alleged children’s novel, became one of Columbus’ darker films, full of moody, gothic lighting, scary creatures and a perpetually imperiled hero. Columbus also directed the second installment, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (2002), and produced part III, the Alfonso Cuaron-directed “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004).

“PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF” (2010): Another adaptation of a best-selling YA series, “Percy” was Columbus’ last directing job before “Pixels,” and starred Logan Lerman as the dyslexic son of Poseidon. Columbus got off the Jackson juggernaut before part II, which was released in 2013.