Director is a key differentiator for finding the movie you're looking for, more so than year which is fuzzy across multiple release dates. There are many examples where a year and title isn't unique, but very few where director and title isn't unique, and nearly zero where title, year, AND director wouldn't be unique. At the very least, the director name should be inserted into the text that the query string is compared to.

Right now, without making a second call to get the crew data for each potential match, a user is left with two options that are highly dependent on popularity, which doesn't seem to be a consistent or reliable metric.

1) Query for title + year: This gives you the best chance at finding the correct movie IF it's the most popular and you can just default to the first result. But there's no way to confirm that it's the correct movie without making a second call to retrieve the crew list.

2) Query for title + primary_release_year : This gives you the best chance at finding a lower popularity movie, BUT if the year is incorrect (because the primary release date oftentimes doesn't match the commonly cited year), you need to fall back to 1 and hope it's the most popular result. OR - worse yet, you do get a match for the primary release year but it's incorrect and again there's no way to confirm it's the correct movie without making a second call for the crew list.

If there's a more reliable way to do this, please let me know, but not having movies directly queryable by director seems like a real limitation.