“Who is your favorite filmmaker?” As critics, we get asked this question a lot, and we all have different answers. Usually we ask for clarification: “Who is our favorite filmmaker ever? Or working today?”
Because film is now well over a century old, and many of the greatest directors who ever lived are no longer with us. There are few who could ever hope to compare to Akira Kurosawa, Frank Capra or Alfred Hitchcock, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of filmmakers who are consistently turning in brilliant, fascinating or at least entertaining work, year after year. So this month at CraveOnline, we wanted to celebrate the greatest directors working today.
Related: CraveOnline Picks The 50 Most Romantic Movies Ever Made
We asked our four film critics – William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo – to each nominate 50 filmmakers whose work consistently excites them. The guideline was that each filmmaker needed to have released at least three feature films by the date of publication, and must have directed either one film since 2010, or have at least one film on the schedule for the new future. A few of our finalists skirt these rules, but our committee members fought hard enough for their inclusion that we decided to cut them some slack.
The votes were then tallied, resulting in the following list of CraveOnline’s picks for The Top 50 Greatest Directors Working Today, with each filmmaker presented by one of the critics who championed them. Each of the 50 finalists, along with our 50 runners up, is accompanied by the most recent film which we think could be legitimately considered some of their finest work. Find out where you favorite directors wound up on the list, and let us know if there are any amazing filmmakers that you can’t believe were left out.
The Top 50 Greatest Directors Working Today:
The 50 Runners Up:
51. Chan-wook Park (Stoker)
52. Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin)
53. Jaco Van Dormael (Oldboy)
54. Frank Henenlotter (Bad Biology)
55. Abbas Kiarostami (Certified Copy)
56. Guy Maddin (The Forbidden Room, pictured)
57. John Lasseter (Toy Story 2)
58. Catherine Breillat (Abuse of Weakness)
59. Mike Leigh (Mr. Turner)
60. Julie Taymor (Across the Universe)
61. Jean-Luc Godard (Goodbye to Language 3D, pictured)
62. Terry Gilliam (The Zero Theorem)
63. Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous)
64. Wes Craven (Scream)
65. Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights)
66. Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down, pictured)
67. John Woo (Red Cliff)
68. Lucky McKee (The Woman)
69. Peter Jackson (The Return of the King)
70. Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle)
71. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, pictured)
72. J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year)
73. Adam Wingard (The Guest)
74. Wong Kar-Wai (The Grandmaster)
75. Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim)
76. Rian Johnson (The Brothers Bloom, pictured)
77. Paul Verhoeven (Black Book)
78. Joss Whedon (The Avengers)
79. James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy)
80. Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy)
81. James Gray (The Immigrant, pictured)
82. James Wan (The Conjuring)
83. Tim Burton (Big Eyes)
84. Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave)
85. Luc Besson (Lucy)
86. M. Night Shyamalan (Unbreakable, pictured)
87. Roman Polanski (The Ghost Writer)
88. Jon M. Chu (Step Up 3D)
89. David Ayer (Fury)
90. George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City)
91. Cary Fukanaga (Jane Eyre, pictured)
92. John Sayles (Go for Sisters)
93. Kevin Smith (Red State)
94. Alexander Payne (Nebraska)
95. Danny Boyle (Trance)
96. James Ponsoldt (The End of the Tour, pictured)
97. Gaspar Noe (Enter the Void)
98. Lloyd Kaufman (Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1)
99. Bela Tarr (The Turin Horse)
100. Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive)
The Top 50 Greatest Directors Working Today
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50. Jane Campion
Campion has won an Oscar (for writing The Piano) and she out True Detective-d True Detective, by filming the entire seven episode first season of a creepy, atmospheric mystery on cable with Top of the Lake, prior to the boys club edition. That series is set on a lowly populated island, which is fitting because Campion's heroines often are an island to themselves - mute (Piano), abused (Top of the Lake), strictly ladylike (The Portrait of a Lady), or prone to slip into fantasy (Sweetie) - they harbor dark psychological anguish, but still hold onto hope. Perhaps that survival instinct is due to the fact that, as Campion will remind Hollywood, "women gave birth to the entire world."
Latest Masterpiece: Bright Star (2009)Hope in Bright Star is the poetry of an equal relationship. It's set in 19th century England, and there is a distinct lack of hysteria for a Campion film. Instead, Bright Star is an examination of a loving relationship (between Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish) that was entirely equal in life. But - as he is published poet John Keats - he is remembered long after his death for his personal craft, and she is resigned to hem anonymously.~ Brian Formo -
49. Clint Eastwood
When movie star Clint Eastwood moved behind the camera, he ended up directing some of his most exciting films like The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Gauntlet. By the ‘90s and ‘00s he was directing some of the decades’ most acclaimed films like Unforgiven, A Perfect World, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. He works so often that, like Woody Allen, his misses seem just as prolific, but since his output is so consistent it’s easier to weather the duds. His style is famously sparse: he's rumored to shoot rehearsals and print the first take. In later films he decided to even take out most of the color, so “sparse” is a signature, just like The Man with No Name’s dialogue. When it serves the material, it’s like Pale Rider’s dynamite.Latest Masterpiece: American Sniper (2014)Separating the filmmaking from any biases of the script, Eastwood made a portrait of our servicemen that hit people like one of Chris Kyle’s shots. On a purely technical level Eastwood crafted action sequences far beyond any that Dirty Harry faced.~ Fred Topel -
48. Herschell Gordon Lewis
Lewis practically invented the gore film back in the 1960s. Limited by budget, Lewis outstripped his grindhouse competitors by introducing buckets of blood into his movies. Movies like Blood Feast, Two-Thousand Maniacs!, and The Wizard of Gore changed what horror could do and be. Exploitation exploded, and the bold, gleeful gut-wrenching grossness of the grindhouse became a bonkers, low-budget artful aesthetic. What a delight.
Latest Masterpiece: Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002)
After decades of vacation, Lewis returned to films with a sequel to his infamous Video Nasty. If anyone is going to imitate the master and bring exploitation’s golden era back to screens, it may as well be the master himself.
~ Witney Seibold
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47. Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan is the greatest physical performer, and the films he directed himself showcase the very best of his physical abilities. Not that he was ever a slouch for Stanley Tong or Yuen Wu Ping, but maybe Chan was the only director crazy enough to let him do the craziest stunts. As a director, Chan wasn’t only about the action though. He mastered the absurd comedy in the middle of gritty cop dramas, the sort of tonal shift that became a staple of Hong Kong Cinema. His best work is the little known Miracles: The Canton Godfather, Chan’s remake of Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles. Balancing farce, romance and fights showed Chan was a master filmmaker as well as performer. But of course Police Story, Armor of God 2 and Drunken Master II are also tours de force.Latest Masterpiece: Chinese Zodiac (2012)Chan returned after a decade to direct the loose threequel to Armor of God, showing he’s still pushing the creative boundaries of stunts, even when visual effects are incorporated.~ Fred Topel -
46. Shion Sono
Shion Sono isn’t so much a filmmaker as he is a mad alchemist, mixing ideas, characters, genres and tones that otherwise have no business together. His four-hour up-skirt ninja panty photographer romance Love Exposure has already become the stuff of legend, and his wall-to-wall ultraviolent gangster rap opera ode to peace Tokyo Tribe seems likely to follow suit. But Shion Sono is at his best when he uses insanity to strip away our defenses. By the end of Cold Fish he leaves us bare, satisfied yet horrified at the shocking but believable moral free fall.
Latest Masterpiece: Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (2013)
A sprawling crime saga becomes a gushing, spurting, arterial love note to 35mm cinema when the yakuza hire a crew of desperate auteurs to choreograph and film their upcoming gang war. Like most Shion Sono films, it shouldn’t even make sense, but miraculously turns out brilliant.
~ William Bibbiani
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45. Steven Soderbergh
We’ll believe he’s retired when we read Steven Soderbergh’s obituary. And even then we’d half expect to see one more finished work surface. From 1989’s Sex Lies and Videotape through 2013’s Behind the Candelabra, Soderbergh made some of the most interesting films of modern times. When unfettered by studio demands, he pushed the boundaries of narrative in experimental films like Schizopolis and Bubble. He’d use non-actors in the latter, or make actors of both Sasha Grey and Gina Carano. He’d use old film cameras to make the classical Hollywood film The Good German. Yet he could elevate mainstream fair like Out of Sight and Oceans 11 with a breezy aesthetic that never dumbed it down for his audience.Latest Masterpiece: Magic Mike (2012)If everybody thought a movie about male strippers would be a joke, they didn’t know Soderbergh. He’s king at taking unorthodox subjects and making real movies out of them.~ Fred Topel -
44. Robert Zemeckis
Robert Zemeckis, in terms of his bold, clear, populist craft, is about as good a filmmaker as Steven Spielberg. He makes boldly fun, very entertaining hits which tend to shape pop culture in unexpected ways. His Back to the Future is beloved by a generation, and Forrest Gump is surely a touchstone of some sort. Yet he’s still interested in expanding. Films like Cast Away and Contact show a wider interest in material, and with his animated films (achieved largely with motion capture technology) seek to expand cinema’s visual palate.
Latest Masterpiece: Flight (2013)
His most emotionally ambitious film, Flight, examines alcoholism, and, through some exhilaratingly populist filmmaking, unlocks one man’s low point of substance abuse. Ironically, his low point also happens to be the most heroic thing he has ever done.
~ Witney Seibold
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43. Todd Haynes
Haynes launched his career in New Queer Cinema by making a documentary about Karen Carpenter's deadly body issues, using concert footage, interviews, and Barbie doll re-enactments. Haynes is most interested in covers, both outward - a woman who's worried about disease joins a cultish society (Safe), all the glitter and sequins in glam rock (The Velvet Goldmine), Bob Dylan played by men and women actors (I'm Not There) - and internal: a woman discovers that her husband is a homosexual in Far From Heaven. But though he examines masks, his films aren't repressed: they're full of rich colors, and those bursting dramas that occur in between other dramas.Latest Masterpiece: Mildred Pierce (2011)
Technically Pierce is a five-hour mini-series, but as he is an internationally respected director, it was shown in its entirety at the Venice Film Festival, and it is a perfect example of Haynes: he thought all the melodrama contained in the John Cain novel couldn't be cut into a standard two hour movie and still register as a proper tragedy. Haynes gave Kate Winslet an American rarity: her own Berlin Alexanderplatz. (Note: This year, Haynes will release his first proper two hour movie in nearly a decade, the Cate Blanchett-Rooney Mara melodrama Carol.)~ Brian Formo -
42. Claire Denis
Claire Denis favors visuals over traditional dialogue and narrative structure. With Beau Travail, she made one of the most beautiful soldier films ever made strictly because she made the bodies of the training men her story (the Dijibouti location helped, too). In 35 Shots of Rum she's able to make the gift of a rice cooker monumental after showing the day-to-day rituals of various immigrant metro workers who keep Paris moving. And never has a vampire ever looked so hungry, yet strong as in Trouble Every Day. Denis' underlying theme throughout most of her work - including two colonialist films, Chocolat and White Material - is that the myth of European progress has sucked the world dry.
Latest Masterpiece: Bastards (2013)
Perhaps the most philosophical of Denis' films, Bastards shows social conditions of gender expectations, and selfish pursuits of connections leading to immense pain in a family that's already grieving from a suicide. Denis isn't a nihilist like Michael Haneke can be. She presents various peoples behaviors in all her films. This one happens to be full of bastards.
~ Brian Formo
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41. James Cameron
I once considered James Cameron the greatest storyteller of our generation. Had he made movies more frequently, I may still be able to support that, but deep sea diving took him away from filmmaking. As a writer/director, he was that unfortunately rare artist creating wholly original stories and seeing them through to their execution at the highest standards. Even based on historical events, Titanic was an original classic Hollywood romance, and I imagine the remake True Lies invented a lot for Schwarzenegger’s persona. What’s best, he makes big movies for big audiences with big ideas. The Terminator is a profound story, and The Abyss surely ahead of its time. His female heroines made important strides for cinematic feminism, even the ones he inherited from Ridley Scott.Latest Masterpiece: Avatar (2009)Avatar may be my least favorite James Cameron movie, but it doesn’t suck. He did performance capture right after all those glassy-eyed Zemeckis movies, and his action sequences are still expert.~ Fred Topel -
40. Asghar Farhadi
He is perhaps the greatest living filmmaker working in the detective genre, but he doesn’t need real detectives. Asghar Farhadi is more invested in peeling back the layers of secrecy and lies in the contemporary family to highlight the little horrors, enormous details and defensive egos that lie within. With his Oscar-winning A Separation he examined the truth, or lack thereof, behind a single moment in which nobody was being honest with themselves, or anyone else. And in The Past he unravels the deceptions that keep a family together, even though they appear to be tearing it apart.
Latest Masterpiece: The Past (2013)
A man returns home to finalize his divorce, only to find there is something horribly wrong. But each new revelation uncovers another veil of well-intentioned, yet destructive denial. The last shot will wreck you.
~ William Bibbiani
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39. Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone is a political bad boy and unashamedly left-wing preacher who seeks to undo political injustice with his masterworks. In JFK, he looks at the uneasiness the nation felt after the Kennedy assassination. In Platoon, he sought to drain the Vietnam War of its romance. In Wall Street, he pretty much condemned the entire Reagan generation for their greed. In recent years he has become less edgy, but no less ambitious, skewering injustice, while also pursuing bizarre artistic pet projects like Alexander.
Latest Masterpiece: W. (2008)
One would think that Stone’s biopic of George W. Bush would be more acidic, but it’s no less damning for its gentleness. In Stone’s exploration of what he considers to be this nation’s stupidest president, he shows him as he is. A smiling, clueless fratboy who bit off way more than he could chew and, well, just lost sight of the ball.
~ Witney Seibold
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38. Gus Van Sant
Van Sant can be hit or miss, but at least he takes chances. After making three northwestern masterpieces of skid row routines - the pursuit of incomplete love in Mala Noche, the pursuit of the perfect haul of pills in Drugstore Cowboy, and the pursuit of making it from the gutter to the stars in My Own Private Idaho - Van Sant has been turning in films at a ratio of one-great-film for every dud. Following the Psycho remake, and the immortal Sean Connery YTMND, Van Sant made a trio of sparse, open-ended, and interestingly shot films - Elephant, Gerry, and Last Days - and proved that yes! yes! he could still be an indie top dawg.Latest Masterpiece: Milk (2008)Van Sant is in one of his lesser streaks following Restless and Promised Land; his last great film was Milk, which - despite ending with the assassination of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) - is Van Sant's celebration of a life lived fully. After his experimental death trilogy, Milk was his release. Pivoting back to death, Van Sant now has a McConaughey-visits-Japan-to-commit-suicide film, Sea of Trees coming out this year.~ Brian Formo -
37. Bong Joon-ho
Bong is a rarity: he can tackle any genre - detective (Memories of Murder), toxic monster (The Host), familial murderous melodrama (Mother), and post-apocalyptic class warfare (Snowpiercer) - and give it a new spin. He's like a guy who walks into an art museum and nudges the frames to give them a different perspective. And his constant flourish is that crookedness, he loves making a character fall when they're trying to be cool, or pull out their dentures to show that they're weak.
Latest Masterpiece: Snowpiercer (2014)
Snowpiercer is a world ensemble movie, fighting for what remains of the world in a confined space. It's got Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, John Hurt, and Song Kang-ho playing creatures who are taught notions of class that make it damn near impossible for us all to co-exist... even if extermination is looming.~ Brian Formo -
36. Noah Baumbach
Movies tend to romanticize, or at least overloook, the small pesky emotional foibles of day-to-day life. Noah Baumbach is keen on exposing them. Small, awkward social interactions, having to let go of your old relationship dynamics in adulthood, watching your parents drift apart… these are Baumbach’s bread and butter, and it’s an amazing feat that he is able to wring so much truth and comedic self-recognition out of such situations.
Latest Masterpiece: The Squid and the Whale (2005)
The Squid and the Whale is about a divorce, as seen through the eyes of the couple’s two young sons. Divorce exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, and children of that generation may recognize the bleak, painful comedy of watching your parents split, and domesticity mutating into something new.
~ Witney Seibold
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35. Mamoru Hosoda
TV fans love Mamoru Hosoda for his inspired work on the anime series Digimon and Samurai Champloo, but as a feature filmmaker his artistry has only expanded in ambition and depth. His movies tend to highlight teenagers who are liberated by, and later trapped inside of fantasy situations: time travel (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time), life-threatening virtual worlds (Summers Wars) and werewolf motherhood (Wolf Children). But no matter how broad his subject, Mamoru Hosoda anchors his films in rich, honest humanity, illustrated with one unforgettable image after another.
Latest Masterpiece: Summer Wars (2009)
A math genius, hired to be a pretend boyfriend for the weekend, winds up at the center of a global disaster after a rogue computer virus threatens the world. The extended clan of characters that surround him become a microcosm for the entire planet, but can they set aside their petty squabbles long enough to save humanity?
~ William Bibbiani
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34. Brad Bird
Audiences originally ignored Brad Bird’s first feature, the glorious 2D animated The Iron Giant. They kicked themselves for it later, and got swept up in his two Oscar-winning Pixar classics The Incredibles and Ratatouille: two gorgeous, funny and thrilling films about about the dangers of being exceptional. Although Brad Bird’s first live-action feature, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, was a relatively straightforward action thriller, he appears to be moving back to the realms of the inspiration with this summer’s Tomorrowland.
Latest Masterpiece: Ratatouille (2007)
His Mission: Impossible was nice and thrilling, but it’s Bird’s last animated feature (to date) that seems more likely to be remembered. The tale of a rat who, quite ironically, is also a gourmet chef is playful to the extreme, but serious about the plight of underdog artists who just need someone within the establishment to take a real chance on them.
~ William Bibbiani
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33. Sam Raimi
Sam Raimi was the first director to make me actually recognize filmmaking. It was watching Evil Dead II, in my early foray into horror movies. You mean you can turn the camera that way? You mean you can cut those two shots together? I adored seeing Raimi’s kooky aesthetic explore genres like superheroes in Darkman and westerns in The Quick and the Dead, even sober drama in A Simple Plan. His three Spider-Man movies (yes, all three) are the definitive on screen incarnation of that character. Along with Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men, those films are responsible for getting superhero movies taken seriously, and keeping them interesting with interesting filmmakers. I loved seeing Raimi treat the Wizard of Oz like Ash in Evil Dead in Oz the Great and Powerful too.Latest Masterpiece: Drag Me To Hell (2009)Returning to horror, Raimi showed he hasn’t lost any of his edge or the devilish glee he takes in punishing an attractive lead actor.~ Fred Topel -
32. Errol Morris
Perhaps the most artificial of all documentarians, Errol Morris is interested in the extremes of the human mind. He seeks out oddballs, outsiders, and even the politically and morally maligned, to see the world from their perspective. A Brief History of Time did it from Stephen Hawking’s perspective, and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control explored a quartet of oddball experts in strange fields. He is also unabashedly political, trying to undo some of the damage of warmongers like Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld.
Latest Masterpiece: The Fog of War (2003)
Morris attempts to put his own neuroses about the Vietnam War to rest by interviewing Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of War. McNamara is a well-spoken and morally frothright man who feels he did nothing wrong, but is smart enough to see that he’s on the wrong side of history.
~ Witney Seibold
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31. Ang Lee
It may seem difficult to define Ang Lee by his films, which range from action spectaculars to period romances and everything in between. But if there really is any connective tissue between his many great movies, it’s a sense of flexibility. The emotional weight behind a wuxia fantasy like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or the universality behind his classic homosexual love story Brokeback Mountain. Even his oft-maligned Hulk can’t be reduced to a mere superhero movie; he’s too fascinated by the psychology of his characters to let any of his films be any one thing.
Latest Masterpiece: Life of Pi (2012)
An amazingly photographed tale of survival, in which a young Indian boy adrift at sea must share his lifeboat with a man-eating tiger. The film begins with a claim that this story will make you believe in God, but by the end, Ang Lee might have also made a perfect argument for the exact opposite too. Life of Pi is beautiful exploration of just about everything.
~ William Bibbiani
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30. Michael Haneke
Haneke is a former Austrian philosophy professor who conducts experiments with film. How much violence - physical or emotional - can you witness within the confines of a film - which is encoded with packaged promises of good always defeating evil - before your brain starts to question why you're even watching. Oh shit, good isn't going to triumph. This process started with Benny's Video and Funny Games, but then it became much more doctoral - attempting to get to the root of the problem - with a forgotten Algerian war wreaking havoc in the lives of modern French couple in Cache and the exact German town that planted the seed of fascism in The White Ribbon.Latest Masterpiece: Amour (2012)
Perhaps Haneke's most loving film follows a lifelong couple, one facing the deterioration of their body before the other begins losing any faculties. In true Haneke fashion, the act of love becomes a question of how much could you watch someone you care about endure pain and misery before performing the ultimate act of love, and removing the pain and suffering from their lives?~ Brian Formo -
29. Wachowski Starship
The great pop filmmakers of our time? Quite possibly. Larry and Lana Wachowski make populist films about intellectual subjects, transforming an existential crisis into a blockbuster Matrix trilogy about killer computers and kung fu, and an old school Cinderella fable into a pointed indictment of the royalty we all aspire to be. Even when they’re just being silly they make a film like Speed Racer, in which style becomes substance becomes revolutionary. And their ambitious epic Cloud Atlas (co-directed by Tom Tykwer) only gets better with repeat viewings, cementing their pervasive obsession with malleable identities and the complex pursuit of simple understanding.
Latest Masterpiece: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Critics who are writing off Jupiter Ascending as silly and derivative are missing the forest for the trees. Wachowski Starship have undermined the old school fairy tale into a daring and imaginative adventure in which the lowest class of person becomes the highest class, and rejects everything she thought she always wanted. Even the knight in shining armor is revealed, quite literally, to be little more than a lapdog. Like he always was.
~ William Bibbiani
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28. Lars Von Trier
The phrase “enfant terrible” is often used to describe Lars Von Trier, Denmark’s depressive auteur. Von Trier has wrestled with depression his whole life, and his films thrust despair into your face with an aggressive hand. He has not, however, sacrificed truth or art to do so, making some of the most jarring, moving, and difficult movies of the last decade. Films like Dogville, Breaking the Waves, Antichrist, and Dancer in the Dark seem to argue that compassion is a misguided form of mental illness.
Latest Masterpiece: Nymphomaniac (2014)
Von Trier’s 5 ½ hour sex epic is playful, wrong, pornographic, presumptuous, and might even enforce certain sexual myths, but it’s also the director letting loose and fully exploring what he wants to. It’s his most earnest, artiest, and most honest film.
~ Witney Seibold
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27. Sofia Coppola
Now the reigning champ of the Coppola filmmaking dynasty (excepting Nicolas Cage, who does not consider Coppola his real name), Sofia made two of the finest films with The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. A master at cinematic patience, Sofia Coppola will let her films breathe. Even her failures have been interesting: a rock ‘n roll Marie Antoinette and a divisive celebutante feature The Bling Ring. She’s definitely been pushing the aesthetic since the minimalist days, using music and flamboyant costumes/set pieces in Marie and embracing social media footage in Bling. She’s not afraid of stillness though. Whatever the forum, we know that the next film that comes from Sofia Coppola will be distinctly hers.Latest Masterpiece: Somewhere (2010)Coppola returned to a minimalist film with her portrayal of a lonely and bored actor (Stephen Dorff), alluding to some Hollywood self-parody along the way.~ Fred Topel -
26. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
There’s no such thing as a bad idea for a movie… so long as you give that bad idea to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. This filmmaking duo has made a cottage industry of elevating artistically bankrupt studio notes into exciting, intelligent and moving cinema. A plotless picture book became a breathtaking natural disaster comedy in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Pointless nostalgia became a pointed and witty high school adventure in 21 Jump Street, and a shameless commercial for toys became the perfect fodder for unexpected metatext in The LEGO Movie. These guys don’t half-ass anything, and they’re raising the bar with every passing year.
Latest Masterpiece: 22 Jump Street (2014)
Leave it to Lord and Miller to breathe life into the lifeless comedy sequel genre, bluntly repeating every beat from their classic 21 Jump Street but finding new ways to make it funny, parody the studio machine and explore the rich bromance of their protagonists.
~ William Bibbiani
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25. Jim Jarmusch
Jarmusch is effortlessly cool. His narratives are loose, and strummed. He doesn't write a tight script, he jams. And cool people who like to jam—like Richard Edson, John Lurie, Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, (90s) Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, Neil Young, Forest Whitaker, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Hiddleston—are drawn to him because they can let their hair down, their limbs linger, and dabble in genres like a western, a samurai film, a romantic comedy and even a vampire story, and pretend that there's no toughness in it, just thin, effervescent, androgynous coolness.
Latest Masterpiece: Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)
Take all of that coolness from above and add centuries of observed shifts in coolness and you've got Only Lovers Left Alive (it's the vampire one).~ Brian Formo -
24. Pedro Almodóvar
Zesty, sexy, fleshy, and fun, Almodóvar is like your naughty gay uncle. His films are part explosion of pornographic conventions, part telenovela, part musical, and part comedy, but all his films are undeniably emotionally earnest. He tends to look at the way men and women relate, but he doesn’t forget to include their foibles, mistakes, and oddball sexual predilections. Starting with All About My Mother, and lasting all the way through Talk to Her, you have some of the finest, most rambunctious, campiest movies of the master’s career.
Latest Masterpiece: Bad Education (2004)
Almodóvar’s NC-17-rated film unpacks sexual abuse and how it can emotionally damage a young man. It’s rough, fitfully funny, and very true.
~ Witney Seibold
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23. Edgar Wright
Edgar Wright doesn’t just understand geeks, he understands the value of their culture. He knows that zombie movies force their characters and their audiences to examine their real priorities, and that cop movies have as much to do with male bonding as they do with car chases and explosions, on camera and off. His stories are thick with detail, running gags and meaningful revelations about his characters, whose love for each other is only amplified by the ridiculous situations into which Wright forces them.
Latest Masterpiece: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
Edgar Wright finally reveals the world of 21st Century youth as it really is: so pervasively infected by populist art that fantasy becomes indistinguishable from reality. A young schmuck must defeat his new girlfriend’s exes in mortal combat in order to win her heart, a clever allegory for overpowering emotional baggage, interpreted as a series of over the top boss battles.
~ William Bibbiani
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22. Werner Herzog
His fiction films are all part documentary, and his documentaries might be partly fictional. Herzog is a bleakly playful director who seeks to send his crews, his audiences, and himself to extreme reaches of the planet to explore the smallness of humanity in relation to the overpowering indifference to godlike nature. Aguirre: The Wrath of God is about conquistadors lost in the overwhelming jungles. And Fitzcarraldo is essentially a telling of its own making. Reality and fiction can be the same, Herzog argues. And is that not one of the functions of all film? To blur that line?
Latest Masterpiece: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
How long have humans been artists? Since we were barely human. Herzog’s documentary delves deep into a series of caves below France that haven’t been touched for literally 30,000 years. In it, he looks at the cave paintings made by our distant ancestors. We look, and we see outrselves in many ways.
~ Witney Seibold
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21. Spike Lee
From the top: Lee's Do the Right Thing is arguably the most vital, relevant, and honest American film of the last 25 years. Lee's done other interesting work in portraits of divisions in New York families (Crooklyn, He Got Game) and crime (Clockers, 25th Hour), but he's actually entering a Gus Van Sant phase of his career: a director for hire for studio fare, and making personal, low-budget arthouse indies on the side. The taut bank robbery team dynamics of The Inside Man helped actualize the aching Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke. The Hollywood remake of a Korean cult classic, Oldboy, made the sparse, muggy, and desperate Red Hook Summer and Sweet Blood of Jesus. There are now Spike Lee films and there are Spike Lee joints.
Latest Masterpiece: Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2015)Lee's latest film is being maligned perhaps moreso because he asked for public help to make it (via Kickstarter). Also because he was remixing a largely unseen vampire-marijuana 70s exploitation flick Ganja & Hess. This is a Spike Lee joint: it lives between the harsh divisions between sex and fucking, murder and killing.~ Brian Formo -
20. Francis Ford Coppola
While his later, more experimental efforts have been spotty, a back catalog that includes Apocalypse Now, The Godfather and The Conversation can’t be negated, not even by Youth Without Youth. Going crazy in the jungle led Coppola to his masterpiece, one of the greatest films of all time let alone war film. Going crazy at his own studio led to One From the Heart and essentially getting Coppola kicked out of Hollywood. If you let him make a mainstream movie, he can still do it. See Dracula or his John Grisham thriller. What comes next is likely to be something experimental like Twixt, where he wanted to use digital technology to edit the film live for each showing, meaning it would be a different cut every time it played. That didn’t work, but maybe next time.Latest Masterpiece: The Rainmaker (1997)Okay, it’s been a while, but during the Grisham craze of the ‘90s, Coppola made the best one. It is maybe Grisham’s most complex, worthy story and Coppola gives it the Godfather treatment.~ Fred Topel -
19. Spike Jonze
Jonze started in music videos, and I think a summation of his character as a film director would be remiss to ignore them. Jonze is, first a foremost, a visual humorist. He takes images that seem bizarre at first glance, but are also immediately absurdly funny. But then, once you get past the initial chuckle, you’ll find a bizarre emotional earnestness under them. His debut feature Being John Malkovich announced his taste for the bizarre in a big way, and audiences fell into the same wavelength with ease.
Latest Masterpiece: Her (2013)
A non-judgmental and non-cautionary tale about the encroaching of tech in our personal lives, Her tells the story of a young man who falls in love with the artificial intelligence in his smartphone. It’s a film that explores tech, yes, but also explores the way human beings love.
~ Witney Seibold
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18. The Dardenne Brothers
The Belgian brother duo are both realists, and humanists. Like many European auteurs their narratives focus on the people who struggle on the fringes of society, but the Dardennes are different than most: the puncture the boxes that enclose the working class, and allow light in. They do not wallow in misery or provide false hope. They present pain, joy, and happiness in a way that is recognizable to every culture that is comprised of human beings.Latest Masterpiece: Two Days, One Night (2014)
During times of struggle what is a human being's life worth? What if it directly takes from your gain? While Europe still reels from a recession, that is the question that the Dardennes make their subject (a depressed Marion Cotillard, who has internalized that she does not have a set value) pose to her former co-workers who can choose between a small Christmas bonus for everyone, or letting her keep her job, but sacrifice that bonus.~ Brian Formo -
17. Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow always made good movies, but she really took it to the next level with her Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker. It seems kind of lame to comment on how a woman handled badass movies like Near Dark and Point Break, but perhaps that was her strength. Her no nonsense style transcended gender long before audiences (and even critics) were ready to. Her last two theatrical films dealt with the War on Terror in highly sophisticated ways. Where Hurt Locker showed us what kind of person it takes to fight a twistedly clever enemy, Zero Dark Thirty showed how the top brass got the intel the ground forces needed, or at least how one woman in the military forced them to. I’m still waiting for my Strange Days brain downloads though.Latest Masterpice: The Hurt Locker (2009)A sobering military drama highlighted by sequences of Hitchcockian suspense. Sadly, there are unlimited configurations of IED explosives from which to craft cinematic thrills.~ Fred Topel -
16. Christopher Nolan
His films have been accused of intellectualism, but that doesn’t mean Christopher Nolan’s movies lack heart. It just means he approaches emotion with fascination, exploring the responses of his characters to external stimuli, never taking them for granted. His murder mysteries reveal more about the detectives’ obsessions than they do about the killers. His Batman movies are obsessed with how a high-tech vigilante might actually exist and how the world might realistically respond with escalating madness. Nolan’s spectacular eye for visual thrills underscores a series of films that presents complex people with complex problems, daring them to feel their way into a solution even when pure logic dictates that all hope is lost.
Latest Masterpiece: Inception (2010)
Christopher Nolan unlocks the human mind, finding within our dreams the material for a corking cinematic thriller and a dense deconstruction of filmmaking itself. The heroes of Inception create a series of fantasies that are convincing yet false, inspiring their audience even as they crumble, infected by the storyteller’s own subconscious anxieties.
~ William Bibbiani
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15. Hayao Miyazaki
Like Steven Soderbergh (#45), we find Hayao Miyazaki’s “retirement” hard to believe. He’s retired before and there’s a good chance he’ll retire again, because clearly he’s not running short of beautiful ideas and imagery. The master animator creates fantasy worlds that dare to be welcoming, folding audiences into his tender imagination and then drifting away into one heartwarming, unexpected journey after another. He’s not afraid to tackle serious issues, like war and environmentalism, but he always errs on the side of hope, assuring us that even though mankind usually screws everything up, we also have a funny way of putting it all back together again.
Latest Masterpiece: The Wind Rises (2013)
Hayao Miyazaki dips into the real world for a change, telling the story of aviation pioneer Jiro Horikoshi, whose innocent dreams of aerodynamic flight ironically became an instrument of destruction in World War II. The Wind Rises asks, “Which would you choose: a world with pyramids or a world without?” The answer might not be an easy one.
~ William Bibbiani
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14. Alejandro Jodorowsky
Jodorowsky is a surrealist of the highest order, and he understands that film is the premium conduit for surrealism. His movies play like dreams and nightmares, but tempered by the refreshing forthright proselytizing of a genuine spiritual master. El Topo is an acid western that launched the midnight movie phenomenon, but for my money, his 1974 epic The Holy Mountain remains his best work. Jodorowsky has said that he intends his films to be used like psychedelic drugs. I would say that he has been largely successful.
Latest Masterpiece: The Dance of Reality (2014)
Jodorowsky came out of a long hiatus to make an autobiography of his childhood in Chile, but with a dreamworld bent. The result may look and move strangely, and feature extended impossible fantasy sequences, but it feels emotionally true.
~ Witney Seibold
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13. Darren Aronofsky
With his first two features, Darren Aronofsky pushed the boundaries of technique, putting us inside the mind of a mathematician in Pi and giving us a vicarious detox in Requiem for a Dream. By comparison, even his time and reality spanning passion project The Fountain is rather linear. Next he gave us two “fly on the wall” dramas in highly volatile fields, The Wrestler and Black Swan. For his biblical epic, Noah, Aronofsky portrayed a group of fallen angels as Peter Jackson style rock monsters. Half the film was a mystical battle movie, and then it was a visual effects storm movie. I’m still disappointed we didn’t get to see what his Robocop would have been, but it’s clear whatever he makes will be a Darren Aronofsky film.Latest Masterpiece: Black Swan (2010)A descent into madness as a prima ballerina (Natalie Portman) tries to do Swan Lake and save her role from the competition (Mila Kunis). With only a few abstract touches, the insanity comes out of the performance.~ Fred Topel -
12. Steven Spielberg
He’s been operating at the top of his game for so long that it may be tempting to take Steven Spielberg for granted. That would be a mistake. The filmmaker who helped shape our collective dreams of adventure, fantasy, science fiction and the most important moments in history still has an uncanny way of reaching into complex situations and extracting the soul, capturing what really matters through the lens of a camera, and making complex stories seem as straightforward - and timeless - as a fable.
Latest Masterpiece: Lincoln (2012)
Spielberg wove his most complicated web in a film that explored the many ethical compromises it took to do something purely moral. Ending slavery in America was a dangerous enterprise that forced many to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, which Spielberg illustrates with both intellectual and emotional precision.
~ William Bibbiani
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11. Alfonso Cuaron
After some Hollywood remakes of A Little Princess and Great Expectations that failed to break through, Cuaron went back to Mexico for the landmark Y Tu Mama Tambien. The simple, yet provocative relationship drama could hardly prepare audiences for what was to come. He made the best Harry Potter movie (sorry Potter-heads, I don’t care if he changed the map) by conveying lots of information on the screen at once. He’d take that to the next level with Children of Men’s long single takes of complex action. Cuaron is pushing the boundaries of what you can do with the camera, without editing. Nothing against editing. It remains an integral part of filmmaking, but it will be exciting to see where else Cuaron can take his technique in the future.Latest Masterpiece: Gravity (2013)A space odyssey in extended single takes, assisted largely by digital technology but creating the same impact as Children of Men, only outside our atmosphere.~ Fred Topel -
10. Woody Allen
He’s been directed about one film a year since the late 1960s, and yes, quite a few of them suck. But Woody Allen never gives up, imbuing farces and serious dramas with the same workhorse ethic every single time, and giving an incredible string of actors the material they needed to give the performance(s) of their careers. Woody Allen is fascinated by love, by anxiety, and by the thoroughly modern ways to seek to better ourselves and, just as often, tear ourselves down. For decades he’s held a mirror up to society and dared us to laugh at what we saw.
Latest Masterpiece: Blue Jasmine (2013)
Woody Allen resets A Streetcar Named Desire in the 21st Century, and finds that the reasons we ruin the lives of everyone around us, including our own, still stem from sad, stymied dreams. Cate Blanchett gives her best performance, which means she also gives one of the best performances ever caught on camera.
~ William Bibbiani
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9. David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg is considered the master of body horror. He films a lot of orifices, cavities, and diseased flesh. He had bodies fall apart, or be taken apart, in The Fly, Scanners, Dead Ringers, The Brood, etc. Body horror is a label that’s been affixed to him like a skin graft. But now that he’s been a filmmaker for 30 years, if you step back and take a broader view from his gaping body holes, you’ll see that his interest in the body is mostly about how the mind ruins it... because it’s always seeking more. More stimulation, more prestige, and ultimately, more separation from the body itself. This dichotomous relationship has made almost every film he's made feel like absolutely no one else could've made it.
Latest Masterpiece: Cosmopolis (2012)
Cosmopolis exposes post-millennial concerns of identity, apathy, physical vs. meta value, telecommunications and sexual dissatisfaction during a 24-hour traffic jam created by three equal physical events: the arrival of the president into the city, an Occupy Wall Street-esque protest and the funeral procession for a recently deceased celebrity. The physical world is a nuisance.~ Brian Formo -
8. Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson has an attention to detail that’s either genius, obsessive-compulsive, or both. His worlds are populated by characters who are desperate to remake their environment in their own image: imposing order when there is none, and anarchy when order is too stifling. They are hopeless dreamers who never give up, never surrender, and usually find a way to make the oppressive nonsense that surrounds them make a little bit of sense. In Anderson’s eyes, everyone is an individual, everyone lives in a collective community, and everything they do is always wonderful.
Latest Masterpiece: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
A lavish hotel stands in for the last vestige of sanity in a world increasingly ripped apart by political conflict and capitalistic greed in The Grand Budapest Hotel, a film that ranks amongst Anderson’s funniest and most thoughtful films. The period setting finally makes all of the director’s quirks feel natural, never twee, and adds important social context to his idealistic fantasies.
~ William Bibbiani
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7. Paul Thomas Anderson
It was two of Anderson's first films that featured a sprawling cast in the San Fernando Valley (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) that garnered Anderson comparisons to one of his cinematic heroes: Robert Altman (The Player, Nashville, Short Cuts). When Anderson switched to intimate character studies of men grappling with their beastly nature (There Will Be Blood, The Master) that association slumped, but it's still apt. Altman followed up his blazing ensemble 70s with intimate filmed plays by Sam Shepherd, David Hare, and Freed & Stone. Anderson's Blood and Master are essentially, expansive cinematic chamber plays. They cover more landscape - for spatial distance is as much a part of Anderson's ensembles as his actors are - but the film's centerpieces are ferocious tête-à-tête scenes that would also be worthy of our best stages.
Latest Masterpiece: Inherent Vice (2014)
Speaking of land, Anderson has always understood California to be a collection of people who live at the end of the American expanse. Inherent Vice has a sprawling cast, a mystery, new age retreats, crooked drug dealing dentists, but underneath it all, the narrative spark is lit by one man's disillusionment with how selling and renting land has killed the American dream when there isn't anything left to settle.
~ Brian Formo
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6. Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick seeks to do nothing less than capture the whole of human emotional existence on camera. He tends to use vast landscapes, quiet lilting music, and whispered voice-over to depict what it must be like to live inside another human being’s conscious mind. His early films, like Days of Heaven, tended to be more story-based, but the masterworks of his more recent output have sought to capture all of life, love, faith, and other enormous thoughts and feelings. Malick’s films can feel abstract and bizarre, but once you slow down, you may feel the ambitious emotional infinity he attempts.
Latest Masterpiece: The Tree of Life (2011)
Malick’s ambitious Best Picture nominee folds together a semi-autobiographical story of his own childhood experience in Texas, and universalizes it, making it feel like a microcosm of all childhoods. Then he folds it into the formation of the universe, showing that even a Texan childhood is a cosmic miracle of sorts.
~ Witney Seibold
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5. David Fincher
Whenever anybody complains about music video directors making features, we can always remind them of the best case scenario. David Fincher had trouble on his first feature, Alien 3, but after he was able to earn final cut, he’s made masterpiece after masterpiece. His dark aesthetic served serial killer dramas like Se7en, the anarchist manifesto Fight Club and even popcorn thrillers like The Game and Panic Room, but also brought out the dark side of tech nerds in The Social Network. Always challenging, he took on serial killers again, this time without the benefit of a satisfying resolution, in the true crime tale Zodiac. While Benjamin Button and the Dragon Tattoo remake may be considered misses, we’re not looking for perfection, only greatness.Latest Masterpiece: Gone Girl (2014)Gillian Flynn’s book and screenplay gave Fincher the opportunity to almost spoof his own Se7en style, revealing the sociopathic nature of our courtship rituals. Didn’t you get that?~ Fred Topel -
4. Richard Linklater
His first movie, Slacker, launched the ‘90s wave of talky indie movies (Kevin Smith says it inspired him to make Clerks), but Linklater took things to the next level his second time out with Dazed and Confused. The ensemble ‘70s masterpiece let to the two-hander Before Sunrise, which ultimately became a trilogy of snapshots of an articulate couple at different points in their relationship. He can deliver standard narratives like School of Rock and Bernie, but Linklater’s real specialty is focusing on dialogue. Just look at the long takes in Before Midnight and marvel at how he captures such conversations.Latest Masterpiece: Boyhood (2014)The nigh-unprecedented technique of filming actors every year for 12 years wasn’t just a gimmick. It illuminated the conventions of time-lapse narratives we take for granted, and told a story that would work either way.~ Fred Topel -
3. Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino is a heavyweight screenwriter who's become a masterful director. His earliest films - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown - allow space for his performers to find the grooves in his insanely quotable dialogue. Those films are in heartbeat with the point and shoot urgency of exploitation films by Walter Hill (Hard Times, The Warriors) and Larry Cohen (Bone, Black Caesar). It was when Tarantino hooked up with cinematographer Robert Richardson (Kill Bill onward) that his camera and set pieces became equally as fluid as his dialogue.
Latest Masterpiece: Django Unchained (2012)
Although Tarantino-haters say that he's a ripoff artist (compare Lady Snowblood's blood-gushing sword fights to Kill Bill's), he's much more of a remix artist. He provides weight to previously unweightable material. For instance, Django begins as a slave exploitation film, but - by the time that Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) make it to the horrific plantation of Candyland - you realize that Tarantino has just been easing you into uncomfortable territory with laughs and winks, to prepare you to stare at his most awful creation.
~ Brian Formo
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2. The Coen Bros.
How astonishing that The Coen Bros. should have become the auteur celebrities they are. Aside from the cult success of The Big Lebowski, and perhaps the stir caused by Raising Arizona, the Coens’ films could be described as odd outliers in the world of cinema. They have a morbid sense of humor, a wry view of American crime, and a sideways approach to human behavior. And yet there is something tight, true, and undeniably intriguing about their comedic view of frustratingly doomed humanity
Latest Masterpiece: No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Coen Bros.’ adaptation of a notoriously difficult-to-adapt Cormac McCarthy novel captured their humorous pop nihilism, but tempered it with genuine adult tragedy. The world, they often argue, will eventually outstrip our understanding.
~ Witney Seibold
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1. Martin Scorsese
As most people get older, they tend to calm down a bit, accepting the world as it is and finding peace within. Martin Scorsese is not one of those people. His recent output is just as full of experimentation and rage as his early classics, practically bloating with disturbed ideas and exciting innovation. The Wolf of Wall Street feels just as inspired as Goodfellas and Taxi Driver before it, and indeed every new Scorsese film seems to herald another opportunity to discover just how inventive this filmmaker can be. He hasn’t lost his touch, and maybe he never will.
Latest Masterpiece: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
A roller coaster ride through shady capitalism, orgiastically celebrating Jordan Belfort’s excess while acknowledging, bitterly, that he never even looked for the palace of wisdom. The Wolf of Wall Street daringly displays the hedonistic appeal of financial success, and makes the startling point that maybe, just maybe, there’s nothing more meaningful about it.
~ William Bibbiani
