 The movie is directed by Lee Isaac Chung, whose previous film, Meenaree, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Our critic at large, John Powers, says Twisters is a pleasurable summer blockbuster with all the virtues and limitations that phrase suggests. I spent my boyhood in small Iowa towns. One afternoon, my mother and I were on the back steps, gazing down across the highway at cornfields that seemed to go on forever.