Current favourite directors
by Catrician | created - 05 Sep 2013 | updated - 20 Nov 2017 | PublicReasonably self explanatory.
Films listed in order of preference.
Notes: Must have seen at least 3 films from, must have at least 1 film on my top 200 to qualify.
1. Jacques Rivette
Director | La Belle Noiseuse
Although François Truffaut has written that the New Wave began "thanks to Rivette," the films of this masterful French director are not well known. Rivette, like his "Cahiers du Cinéma" colleagues Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, did graduate to filmmaking but, like Rohmer...
10/10: Celine and Julie Go Boating 9/10: Secret Defense 8.5/10: Out 1: Spectre, Out 1, La Belle Noiseuse, L'amour fou 8/10: Gang of Four, Jeanne la Pucelle II - Les prisons, Merry-go-round, Jeanne la Pucelle I - Les batailles, The Nun, Love on the Ground, Duelle 7.5/10: Le Pont du Nord 7/10: Noroit, Hurlevent
2. Stanley Kubrick
Director | 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick was born in Manhattan, New York City, to Sadie Gertrude (Perveler) and Jacob Leonard Kubrick, a physician. His family were Jewish immigrants (from Austria, Romania, and Russia). Stanley was considered intelligent, despite poor grades at school. Hoping that a change of scenery would ...
10/10: 2001: A Space Odyssey 9/10: Barry Lyndon, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket 8.5/10: Eyes Wide Shut 8/10: The Killing, The Shining, Lolita 7/10: A Clockwork Orange 5/10: Dr. Strangelove
3. Federico Fellini
Writer | Le notti di Cabiria
The women who both attracted and frightened him and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII - inspired the dreams that Fellini started recording in notebooks in the 1960s. Life and dreams were raw material for his films. His native Rimini and characters like Saraghina (the ...
10/10: La Dolce Vita 9/10: 8 1/2, La Strada, Satyricon 8.5/10: Nights of Cabiria 8/10: Casanova, I Vitelloni
4. Lars von Trier
Writer | Dancer in the Dark
Probably the most ambitious and visually distinctive filmmaker to emerge from Denmark since Carl Theodor Dreyer over 60 years earlier, Lars von Trier studied film at the Danish Film School and attracted international attention with his very first feature, The Element of Crime (1984). A highly ...
9.5/10: Dogville, Breaking the Waves 9/10: Dancer in the Dark, Melancholia 8.5/10:The Idiots 8/10: The Kingdom, Antichrist 7/10: Nymphomaniac Volume 1, The Five Obstructions, Nymphomaniac Volume 2
5. Jean-Luc Godard
Director | Bande à part
Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children in a bourgeois Franco-Swiss family. His father was a doctor who owned a private clinic, and his mother came from a preeminent family of Swiss bankers. During World War II Godard became a naturalized citizen of ...
9/10: Contempt, Pierrot le fou, Prenom Carmen, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Notre musique, Hail Mary, Weekend, Breathless 8.5/10: Vivre sa vie, Nouvelle vague, Dans le noir du temps, Sauve qui peut (la vie), Band of Outsiders 8/10: Goodbye to Language, Numero deux, Histoire(s) du cinema, Helas pour moi, Je vous salue, Sarajevo; Passion, La Chinoise, Masculin Feminin 7.5/10: Detective, Alphaville 7/10: JLG/JLG, Le petit soldat, Tout va bien, Une femme mairee, Origins of the 21st Century, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, A Story of Water 6.5/10: King Lear, In Praise of Love, Une femme coquette, Le gai savoir 6/10: Meeting Woody Allen, Made in USA 5.5/10: A Woman is a Woman 5/10: Film socialisme 4.5/10: For Ever Mozart
6. David Lynch
Writer | Twin Peaks
Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future ...
9.5/10: Mulholland Dr. 9/10: Blue Velvet 8.5/10: Wild at Heart 8/10: Lost Highway, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man 7/10: Inland Empire 5/10: Dune
7. Robert Bresson
Writer | Au hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Public Affairs (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Angels of Sin (1943) in 1943. His next film, The ...
9/10: Au hasard Balthazar 8.5/10: Mouchette, A Man Escaped, Lancelot du lac, Trial of Joan of Arc 8/10: Diary of a Country Priest, Four Nights of a Dreamer, The Devil, Probably; Les dames du Bois du Boulogne, L'argent 7.5/10: Pickpocket 6/10: Une femme douce
8. Béla Tarr
Producer | Werckmeister harmóniák
Béla Tarr was born on July 21, 1955 in Pécs, Hungary. He is a producer and director, known for Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), The Turin Horse (2011) and Satantango (1994). He is married to Ágnes Hranitzky.
9.5/10: Satantango 8.5/10: Werckmeister Harmonies, The Turin Horse 8/10: The Prefab People, The Man From London
9. Terrence Malick
Writer | Days of Heaven
Terrence Malick was born in Ottawa, Illinois. His family subsequently lived in Oklahoma and he went to school in Austin, Texas. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in philosophy in 1965.
A member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, he attended Magdalen ...
9.5/10: The Tree of Life 8.5/10: Badlands 8/10: The New World, Song to Song, Knight of Cups, The Thin Red Line 7.5/10: Days of Heaven 7/10: To the Wonder
10. Andrei Tarkovsky
Writer | Offret
The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the...
9/10: Stalker 8.5/10: Andrei Rublev, Zerkalo 8/10: Solaris, The Sacrifice 7/10: Ivan's Childhood, Nostalghia
11. Orson Welles
Actor | Citizen Kane
His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was ...
9/10: Citizen Kane, The Trial 8.5/10: F For Fake 8/10: The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil 7.5/10: The Magnificent Ambersons 7/10: Chimes at Midnight
12. Carl Theodor Dreyer
Writer | Gertrud
The illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper, Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on the 3th of February, 1889. He spent his early years in various foster homes before being adopted by the Dreyers at the age of two. Contrary to popular belief (perhaps nourished by the ...
9/10: Passion of Joan of Arc 8.5/10: Ordet, Vampyr 8/10: Day of Wrath, Gertrud
13. Kenneth Lonergan
Writer | Manchester by the Sea
Kenneth Lonergan is a playwright, screenwriter and director. His film, You Can Count on Me (2000), which he wrote and directed, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, won the Sundance 2000 Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, the NY Film Critics Circle, LA Film ...
9/10: You Can Count On Me, Manchester By the Sea 8.5/10: Margaret
14. Akira Kurosawa
Writer | Kakushi-toride no san-akunin
After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, eventually making his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Within a few years, Kurosawa had achieved sufficient stature to allow him greater...
9/10: Ran, Seven Samurai, High and Low 8.5/10: Rashomon 8/10: Ikiru, Throne of Blood 7/10: Yojimo 6/10: Kagemusha
15. Nicholas Ray
Director | Rebel Without a Cause
Nicholas Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in 1911, in small-town Galesville, Wisconsin, to Lena (Toppen) and Raymond Joseph Kienzle, a contractor and builder. He was of German and Norwegian descent. Ray's early experience with film came with some radio broadcasting in high school. He left the ...
9/10: The Lusty Men, Bigger Than Life 8/10: On Dangerous Ground, Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause, They Live by Night, The Party Girl, In a Lonely Place 7.5/10: We Can't Go Home Again 5.5/10: The True Story of Jesse James
16. Sion Sono
Director | Ai no mukidashi
Shion Sono is a Japanese director, writer and poet. Born in Aichi Perfecture in 1961 he started his career working as a poet before taking his first steps in film directing. As a student he shot a series of short films in Super 8 and managed to make his first feature films in the late 80s and early...
9/10: Love Exposure 8.5/10: Himizu 8/10: Antiporno, Noriko's Dinner Table
17. Stan Brakhage
Director | The Loom
Stan Brakhage was born on January 14, 1933 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He was a director and cinematographer, known for The Loom (1986), The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (2000) and Visions in Meditation (1990). He was married to Marilyn Jull and Jane Wodening. He died on March 9, 2003 in ...
9/10: Window Water Baby Moving, Dog Star Man 8/10: Spring Cycle, The Dante Quartet, Hell Spit Flexion, Persian Series, For Marilyn, Text of Light, The Garden Path, Loving, Thigh Line Lyre Triangular, In Consideration of Pompeii, Mothlight, The Birds of Paradise, Hymn to Her, Black Ice, Eye Myth, The Garden of Earthly Delights, First Hymn to the Night: Novalis, The Lion and the Zebra Make God's Raw Jewels, 7.5/10: Boulder Blues and Pearls And..., The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, The Dark Tower, Lovesong, The Chartres Series 7/10: Rage Net, Night Music, Delicacies of Moltern Horror Synapse, The Weir-Falcon Saga, Prelude 1, The Wonder Ring, Scenes From Under Childhood, Commingled Containers, Two: Creeley/McClure, Desistfilm, Glaze of Cathexis, Blue Moses 6.5/10: Babylon Series, The Peaceable Kingdom, The Machine of Eden, Kindering, My Mountain Song 27 6/10: Chinese Series, Crack Glass Eulogy, Stellar, Cat's Cradle, Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection, Wedlock House: An Intercourse, Star Garden, 5/10: The World Shadow, Study in Color and Black and White, Clancy, The Dead, Murder Pslam, The Stars are Beautiful, The Shores of Phos: A Fable,
18. John Ford
Director | The Quiet Man
John Ford came to Hollywood following one of his brothers, an actor. Asked what brought him to Hollywood, he replied "the train". He became one of the most respected directors in the business, in spite of being known for his westerns, which were not considered "serious" film. He won six Oscars, ...
9/10: The Grapes of Wrath, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 8.5/10: The Searchers, The Wings of Eagles 8/10: Wagon Master, 7 Women, My Darling Clementine, Young Mr. Lincoln, Stagecoach, The Sun Shines Bright 7.5/10: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man 7/10: Fort Apache
19. Douglas Sirk
Director | Schlußakkord
Film director Douglas Sirk, whose reputation blossomed in the generation after his 1959 retirement from Hollywood filmmaking, was born Hans Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1897, in Hamburg, Germany, to a journalist. Both of his parents were Danish, and the future director would make movies in German, ...
9/10: All That Heaven Allows 8/10: The Tarnished Angels, Written on the Wind, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession
20. Peter Watkins
Director | The War Game
Peter Watkins began his career in advertising as an assistant producer and turned to amateur filmmaking in the late 1950s. In the mid-'60s he was commissioned by BBC-TV to make two feature-length docudramas incorporating a quasi-newsreel style and nonprofessional actors. The second of these, The ...
9/10: Edvard Munch, La commune 8/10: The War Game, Punishment Park, Culloden 7/10: Privilege 6.5/10: The Gladiators
21. Sergio Leone
Writer | Once Upon a Time in America
Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema - he was the son of Roberto Roberti (A.K.A. Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy's cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and U.S. directors working in ...
9.5/10: Once Upon a Time in America 9/10: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly 8/10: For a Few Dollars More 7.5/10: A Fistful of Dollars 7/10: Once Upon a Time in the West
22. Richard Linklater
Director | Waking Life
Self-taught writer-director Richard Stuart Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, to Diane Margaret (Krieger), who taught at a university, and Charles W. Linklater III. Richard was among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s. ...
9/10: Before Sunrise 8.5/10: Boyhood, Before Midnight 8/10: Everybody Wants Some!!, Before Sunset, Bernie, Waking Life 7/10: School of Rock
23. Lav Diaz
Writer | Ang babaeng humayo
Lav Diaz was born on December 30, 1958 in Datu Paglas, Maguindanao, Mindanao, Philippines. He is a writer and director, known for The Woman Who Left (2016), Season of the Devil (2018) and From What Is Before (2014).
9/10: Melancholia 8.5/10: Batang West Side 8/10: Evolution of a Filipino Family, Norte 7/10: Death in the Land of Encantos 6.5/10: From What is Before
24. Chantal Akerman
Director | Les rendez-vous d'Anna
Chantal Akerman was born on June 6, 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for The Meetings of Anna (1978), I, You, He, She (1974) and A Couch in New York (1996). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on October 5, 2015 in Paris, France.
9/10: Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles, Je tu il elle 8.5/10: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels 7.5/10: News From Home 7/10: Tout une nuit, The Meetings of Anna, J'ai faim, f'ai froid 6.5/10: No Home Movie 6/10: Saute ma ville, La chambre, La captive 4.5/10: Almayer's Folly
25. Paul Verhoeven
Director | RoboCop
Paul Verhoeven graduated from the University of Leiden, with a degree in math and physics. He entered the Royal Netherlands Navy, where he began his film career by making documentaries for the Navy and later for TV. In 1969, he directed the popular Dutch TV series, Floris (1969), about a medieval ...
9/10: The Black Book, Showgirls 8/10: Basic Instinct, Robocop, Elle, Starship Troopers 7/10: Soldier of Orange, Total Recall, Hollow Man
26. Abbas Kiarostami
Writer | Copie conforme
Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1940. He graduated from university with a degree in fine arts before starting work as a graphic designer. He then joined the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he started a film section, and this started his career ...
8.5/10: Close-Up, Certified Copy 8/10: Where is the Friend's Home, Through the Olive Trees, A Taste of Cherry 7.5/10: Ten 6.5/10: The Wind Will Carry Us
27. Edward Yang
Writer | Yi yi
Born on November 6, 1947 in Shanghai, China, Edward Yang has become one of the most talented international filmmakers of his generation. Along with Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang, Yang ranks among the leading artists of the Taiwanese New Wave, and one of the world's most brilliant auteurs. ...
9.5/10: A Brighter Summer Day 8.5/10: Yi yi 7.5/10: Taipei Story
28. John Cassavetes
Actor | Rosemary's Baby
John Cassavetes was a Greek-American actor, film director, and screenwriter. He is considered a pioneer of American independent film, as he often financed his own films.
Cassavetes was born in New York City in 1929 to Nicholas John Cassavetes (1893-1979) and his wife, Katherine Demetre (1906-1983). ...
8.5/10: Shadows, Opening Night 8/10: A Woman Under the Influence, Love Streams, Husbands 7.5/10: Faces 7/10: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
29. Ingmar Bergman
Writer | Smultronstället
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, the son of a priest. The film and T.V. series, The Best Intentions (1992) is biographical and shows the early marriage of his parents. The film Sunday's Children (1992) depicts a bicycle journey with his father. In the miniseries Private Confessions (...
9/10: Winter Light 8.5/10: Persona 8/10:Fanny and Alexander, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal 7.5/10: Scenes From a Marriage, Hour of the Wolf 6.5/10: The Virgin Spring 6/10: Through a Glass Darkly
30. Éric Rohmer
Director | Ma nuit chez Maud
Admirers have always had difficulty explaining Éric Rohmer's "Je ne sais quoi." Part of the challenge stems from the fact that, despite his place in French Nouvelle Vague (i.e., New Wave), his work is unlike that of his colleagues. While this may be due to the auteur's unwillingness to conform, ...
9/10: Claire's Knee 8/10: The Green Ray, Perceval, The Collector 7/10: My Night at Maud's
31. Michelangelo Antonioni
Writer | Blow-Up
Together with Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni is credited with defining the modern art film. And yet Antonioni's cinema is also recognized today for defying any easy categorization, with his films ultimately seeming to belong to their own distinctive genre. Indeed, the ...
8.5/10: L'eclisse 8/10: Red Desert, Blowup, The Passenger, Identification of a Woman 7.5/10: La notte, Zabriskie Point, L'avventura
32. Fritz Lang
Actor | Le mépris
Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. ...
9/10: Metropolis 8.5/10: M 8/10: The Big Heat 7.5/10: Fury 7/10: The Indian Tomb, The Tiger of Echnapur, Moonfleet, Spies
33. Harmony Korine
Director | Gummo
Harmony Korine was born in 1973 in Bolinas, California. His family moved to the east coast of the United States when he was five, and he spent his early years in Nashville, Tennessee, and New York. At the age of nineteen, he wrote the critically acclaimed screenplay Kids (1995) for director Larry ...
9/10: Gummo 8.5/10: Julien Donkey-Boy 8/10: Spring Breakers 6/10: Trash Humpers
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