AM Auteur Poll 2014: The REAL Results

[JimmyJazz]

NOTE: Please disregard the previous thread. It was based on a list which featured a significant calculation mistake regarding a specific director. This thread is for the corrected list

Hello fellow AM cinephiles! Welcome to the results of Acclaimed Music Forums 2014 Director/Auteur Poll!

Firstly, before we get on with the results, I would like to thank our 24 voters, in alphabetical order, for contributing to our wonderful collective list:

BleuPanda
bonnielaurel
bootsy
Chambord
Charlie Driggs
Gillingham
Greg
Harold
Henrik
JimmyJazz
Jirin
Liveinphoenix
Maschine Man
McJagger
Michel
Miguel
pauldrach
Petri
PlasticRam
Rob
Romain
Stephan
stone37
whuntva

The format I am going to be following is as so:
Rank, Director Name
Total Points / number of votes
Portrait of said auteur
A quote that I feel sums up the merits of said director quite well
TSPDT Top 250 Directors Rank
"Essential Films" (for objectivity sake, I will choose the five highest rankings films of said director on the TSPDT database.)
The "Biggest Fans" of the director (the voters who placed said director in their Top 20s)

So, without further ado, the results!

[JimmyJazz]

100) Henri-Georges Clouzot
103.58 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 200x250]http://www.fumeursdepipe.net/images/hen ... louzot.jpg[/imgsize]
"In a country like France where good taste is so admired, Henri-Georges Clouzot has been a shocking director. A film critic during the age of surrealism, Clouzot was always eager to assault his audience with his style and concerns." - Dudley Andrew, The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia

TSPDT Rank: 133
Essential Films:
Le Corbeau
Quai des Orfevres
Manon
The Wages of Fear
Les Diaboliques

Biggest Fans:
Michel (13)


99) Nicolas Roeg
105.5 points / 3 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://www.theartsdesk.com/sites/defaul ... 915d60.jpg[/imgsize]
"Amid the general gloom of 1970s British cinema, Nicolas Roeg seemed to represent one of the few real chinks of light. A gifted cinematographer, he moved to directing and quickly established a reputation as a distinctly personal film-maker. With their jagged cutting and disconcerting time shifts, his films didn't look like the work of anyone else and their dark themes of destructive sexuality and confused identity made them sharply provocative." - Robert Shail, British Film Directors: A Critical Guide

TSPDT Rank: 77
Essential Films:
Performance
Walkabout
Don't Look Now
Bad Timing
Eureka

Biggest Fans:
Liveinphoenix (6)


98) Jacques Rivette
108.5 points / 3 votes
[imgsize 320x250]http://filmpressplus.com/wp-content/upl ... ivette.jpg[/imgsize]
"Jacques Rivette is one of the most highly regarded directors of the French New Wave. Throughout his career, he has offered a variety of complex experiences, from the epic Out 1 (1971) to the delicate La belle noiseuse (1991). Admittedly, such movies require a degree of intellectual commitment from spectators that is at odds with conventional viewing habits. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the difficult nature of Rivette's work, the rewards are often all the greater... Rivette remains a key figure of the French New Wave, and the creator of some of cinema's most challenging films." - Guy Crucianelli, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 86
Essential Films:
L'Amour fou
Out 1
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Le Pont du Nord
La Belle noiseuse

Biggest Fans:
CharlieDriggs (10)


97) Asghar Farhadi
113.4 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 300x250]http://i.ndtvimg.com/mt/movies/2012-05/ ... arhadi.jpg[/imgsize]
“Asghar Farhadi was born in 1972 in Iran. He became interested in cinema in his teenage years and started his filmmaking education by joining the Youth Cinema Society of Esfahan in 1986 where he made 8mm and 16mm short films. … His most recent film, A Separation (2011) (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin), became a sensation. It got critical acclaim inside and outside of Iran; Roger Ebert called it "the best picture of the year," and it was awarded the Crystal Simorgh from Fajr Film Festival, Golden Bear and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury from Berlin International Film Festival, and also won Best Foreign Language Film from The Boston Society of Film Critics, Chicago and Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, Golden Globes, César Award, Independent Spirit Award, and ultimately the Academy Award in the 'Best Foreign Language Film of the Year,' making him the first Iranian filmmaker ever to win an Oscar. His Oscar acceptance speech at the 84th Academy Awards, a message of peace in tense political times in his country, made him an instant hero amongst Iranians.” – The IMDb

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
A Separation

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (15)
Gillingham (20)


96) Edward Yang
114.1 points / 3 votes
[imgsize 250x250]https://33.media.tumblr.com/1762a6d990d ... o1_500.jpg[/imgsize]
“Edward Yang is in the intriguing position of being one of the most gifted, and least seen, filmmakers in the world, at least for American audiences. His films express the confusion, anxiety, and sheer beauty of societal transformation. Yang also equates the macrocosmic and microcosmic, making the lives of his characters stand in for the greater, less visible processes of social change. Along with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Yang is one of the most visible faces of the Taiwanese New Wave, possibly the most brilliant filmmaking movement in the world today... A shared trait of all Yang’s films is a complexity resistant to quick summary or explication. Each of his films possesses a difficulty and depth that requires multiple viewings to parse. Even elements of plot and character development are not always clear on first viewing." - Saul Austerlitz, Senses of Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 60
Essential Films:
Taipei Story
The Terrorizers
A Brighter Summer Day
Mahjong
Yi Yi

Biggest Fans:
JimmyJazz (15)
Jirin (19)

[JimmyJazz]

95) Michel Gondry
114.3 points / 2 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qvmXbPbFY1g/U ... Gondry.jpg[/imgsize]
“He grew up in Versailles with a family who was very influenced by pop music. When he was young, Gondry wanted to be a painter or an inventor. In the 80s he entered in an art school in Paris where he could develop his graphic skills and where he also met friends with whom he created a pop-rock band called Oui-Oui. …Gondry was the drummer of the band and also directed their video clips in which it was possible to see his strange world, influenced by the 60s and by his childhood. One of his videos was shown on MTV and when Björk saw it, she asked him to make her first solo video for 'Human Behaviour'. The partnership is famous: Gondry directed five other Björk's videos, benefiting by the huge budgets. Hollywood became interested in Gondry's success and he directed his first feature movie Human Nature (2001), adapting Charlie Kaufman's scenario, which was shown in the 2001 Cannes Festival. Although it wasn't a big success, this film allowed him to direct Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he again collaborated with Charlie Kaufman. The movie became a popular independent film and he and his co-writers won an Oscar for it.” - The IMDb

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
Björk Music Videos
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (1)


94) Roberto Rossellini
118.7 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://hilobrow.com/wp-content/uploads/ ... ellini.jpg[/imgsize]
"Roberto Rossellini was christened "the father of modern film" by Cahiers du Cinéma. Along with Jean Renoir, he was the most important influence on the Nouvelle Vague directors - and beyond them, on Michelangelo Antonioni and anyone who thinks seriously about realism and humanism in cinema, from the Dardenne Brothers to Lars von Trier and the other members of the Dogme collection." - Tom Charity, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 26
Essential Films:
Rome, Open City
Paisa
Germany, Year Zero
Stromboli
Viaggio in Italia

Biggest Fans:
JimmyJazz (9)
Greg (17)


93) Masaki Kobayashi
118.8 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://i2.listal.com/image/1857063/600f ... ayashi.jpg[/imgsize]
“Attended art classes at Waseda University. His work with the Shochiku film company was interrupted by becoming a POW during the Sino-Japanese war. His most famous film, the epic "The Human Condition", set in a Manchurian forced labour camp, was partly based on his experience of wartime incarceration. With films like "Hara-Kiri" and "Kwaidan", he came to be feted in the 1960's as a master of both the samurai movie and the supernatural genre.” - The IMDb

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
The Human Condition Trilogy
Harakiri
Kwaidan

Biggest Fans:
Stephan (8)


92) Steve McQueen
119.3 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://www.departures.com/sites/default ... rector.jpg[/imgsize]
“With his outsider art films, culminating in 12 Years a Slave he forced viewers into a new way of seeing, and feeling, the body and soul in extreme distress. To a half-century of moviegoers and TV fans, the name Steve McQueen meant a terse cowboy with squinty blue eyes. He starred in The Magnificent Seven and Bullitt, loved racing motorcycles and fast cars and died of cancer at 50, in 1980. Then, in 2008, came Hunger, the spare, scalding film biography of IRA volunteer Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in protest against his British captors. Festival and art-house audiences took admiring notice of the fiercely disciplined central performance by Michael Fassbender, and of the film’s director, an Englishman of Grenadian descent. Viewers had to do a little brain shift and realize he had the same name as the old movie star. Now there was a new Steve McQueen. That Steve McQueen. … With luscious, remorseless artistry, he has taught us to see things his unique way. And now our Steve McQueen is the Steve McQueen.” - Richard Corliss, TIME

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
Hunger
Shame
12 Years a Slave

Biggest Fans:
bootsy (14)


91) Darren Aronofsky
120.4 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://www.beyondhollywood.com/uploads/ ... nofsky.jpg[/imgsize]
"Though none of his features to date fit the genre per se, Darren Aronofsky is in some ways a horror director at heart, given his films' fascination with deranged paranoia and physical affliction, as well of his use of subjective camera and exaggerated sound design to mimic jumbled, monomaniacal and sometimes even psychopathic states of mind." - Jessica Winter, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
Pi
Requiem for a Dream
The Fountain
The Wrestler
Black Swan

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (11)
Gillingham (15)

[JimmyJazz]

We start off this next batch of directors with the only tie in the entire Top 100! To determine which director to place higher, I simply went with the auteur whose highest position on a single ballot was greater than the other director's.

90) Zhang Yimou
120.8 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 180x280]https://www.berlinale.de/media/60_jubil ... G_x900.jpg[/imgsize]
"Zhang Yimou's strengths are many: he has a command of intricate, quick narratives all the more surprising in that he sometimes dwells on shots or scenes - but complexities mount up very rapidly (as in the development of the brutal son in Ju Dou); he is as great a director of interiors as Ozu or Mizoguchi - the dye works in Ju Dou and the household in Raise the Red Lantern become superb stages for the melodrama; and he has Gong Li as his actress." - David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

TSPDT Rank: 148
Essential Films:
Red Sorghum
Ju Dou
Raise the Red Lantern
The Story of Qiu Ju
Hero

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (15)


89) Luchino Visconti
120.8 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://theredlist.com/media/database/mu ... edlist.jpg[/imgsize]
"Visconti was a major theater director, and his films flaunted sumptuous costumes and settings, florid acting, and overpowering music... La Terra trema, Senso, Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, The Damned, Ludwig, and Conversation Piece all trace the decline of a family in a period of drastic historical upheaval. Visconti evokes the lifestyles of the rich, but he also usually reveals the class conflict that those lifestyles conceal. Foreign powers conspire with the ruling class to oppress the populace (Senso); the aristocrats must give way to democracy (The Leopard); a bourgeoisie collapses through its own corruption (The Damned)." - Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction

TSPDT Rank: 32
Essential Films:
La Terra trema
Senso
Rocco and His Brothers
The Leopard
Death in Venice

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (7)


88) Abbas Kiarostami
120.9 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://media.sinematurk.com/person/9/49 ... 6738_2.jpg[/imgsize]
"The films of Iranian master Kiarostami, while succeeding partly as oblique but illuminating reflections of his country's recent history, occupy a more fertile territory somewhere between documentary and self-reflexive, modernist drama... Kiarostami's humane compassion for his characters shines bright, his simple compositions and stories and long takes a mark of deep respect for their quiet integrity and strength of spirit." - Geoff Andrew, The Director's Vision

TSPDT Rank: 43
Essential Films:
Where is the Friend's Home?
Close-Up
Through the Olive Trees
A Taste of Cherry
Certified Copy

Biggest Fans:
McJagger (16)
JimmyJazz (18)


87) Spike Lee
123.6 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://cdn.filmschoolrejects.com/images/spike-lee.jpg[/imgsize]
"The most significant turning point in black cinema was the emergence of Spike Lee, whose films explored a hitherto unknown range of themes from a black perspective. It was black directors like Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, and Sidney Poitier in the 1970s who paved the way for Spike Lee in the following decade. But whereas their films catered mainly for black audiences, Lee's appealed to a wider spectrum of society." - Ronald Bergan, Eyewitness Companions: Film

TSPDT Rank: 105
Essential Films:
She's Gotta Have It
Do the Right Thing
Malcolm X
25th Hour
When the Levees Broke

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (12)


86) Claude Chabrol
124.3 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/images ... abrol2.jpg[/imgsize]
"Although occasionally controversial - Une affair des femmes' account of Vichy politics sparked public protests in 1988 - Chabrol's work has seldom generated the cinephiliac excitement attending Godard, or the devoted crowd for Truffaut. But the best Chabrols rank alongside vintage Hitchcock and Lang." - Richard Armstrong, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 233
Essential Films:
Les Cousins
Les Bonnes femmes
La Femme infidele
Le Boucher
La Ceremonie

Biggest Fans:
Romain (3)

[JimmyJazz]

85) Alejandro González Iñárritu
129.7 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 400x280]https://cinemainside.files.wordpress.co ... arritu.jpg[/imgsize]
“A director whose former career as a DJ has instilled in him a spectacular comprehension of pacing and a near-unparalleled ability to weave a compelling, nonlinear tale, Alejandro González Iñárritu stunned filmgoers worldwide with his vital and affecting directorial debut, Amores Perros. Striking a fine balance between brutality and beauty while offering well-defined characters that seem as real as their stark surroundings, Iñárritu's unforgettable take on life in contemporary Mexico City earned the first-time feature director an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film among many other honors -- leaving expectations for a strong sophomore follow-up much higher than usual.” – Allmovie

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
Amores perros
21 Grams
Babel
Biutiful
Birdman

Biggest Fans:
Henrik (9)
Gillingham (14)


84) Guillermo Del Toro
130.7 points / 3 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://www.blastr.com/sites/blastr/file ... ster_3.jpg[/imgsize]
"Approaching fanboy genre fare with all the jokey seriousness of a Marvel-comic scribe, Guillermo del Toro marries science fiction to horror while adding auteurist motifs - his inner entomologist and zealous Catholic upbringing surface again and again in his imagery and symbolism. He has tried with increasing success to alternate mainstream crowd pleasers with more art house pursuits." - Jessica Winter, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
Cronos
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy
Pan's Labyrinth

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (2)


83) Steven Soderbergh
135.9 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vultu ... 50x375.jpg[/imgsize]
"Soderbergh brought an idiosyncratic touch to familiar genre material, striking an implicit détente between the art house and the mainstream, whereby aesthetic integrity and bottom-line exigencies meet halfway." - Jessica Winter, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
sex lies and videotape
Schizopolis
Out of Sight
The Limey
Traffic

Biggest Fans:
bootsy (9)
Miguel (16)


82) Nicholas Ray
140 points / 7 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://image1.findagrave.com/photos/200 ... 847320.jpg[/imgsize]
"One of the finest directors of the '50s, Nicholas Ray transcended the limitations of genre to create movies of a highly personal nature. Imbued with an intense, romantic pessimism and photographed with a rare feel for the emotional resonance of colour and space. Ray's films are distinguished by a passionate identification with society's outsiders, his sympathies possibly arising from his own troubled relationship with the film-making establishment." - Geoff Andrew, The Film Handbook

TSPDT Rank: 70
Essential Films:
In a Lonely Place
The Lusty Men
Johnny Guitar
Rebel Without a Cause
Bigger Than Life

Biggest Fans:
Harold (18)


81) Vittorio De Sica
140.8 points / 6 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://medias.unifrance.org/medias/52/1 ... e-sica.jpg[/imgsize]
"The neorealist films of Vittorio De Sica changed the face of Italian cinema, and the director claimed that, "my films are a word in favour of the poor and unhappy and against the indifference of society towards suffering." - Ronald Bergan, Film - Eyewitness Companions

TSPDT Rank: 29
Essential Films:
Shoeshine
Bicycle Thieves
Miracle in Milan
Umberto D.
Two Women

Biggest Fans:
Chambord (13)

[JimmyJazz]

80) Joseph L Mankiewicz
143.9 points / 3 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://acertaincinema.com/wp-content/up ... z-pipe.jpg[/imgsize]
"Perhaps because he began as a screenwriter, Mankiewicz has often been thought of as a scenarist first and a director only second. But not only was he an eloquent scriptwriter, he was also an elegant visual stylist whose talents as a director far exceeded his reputation. He is one of the few major American directors who was more appreciated during the early years of his career than during the later stages." - Eric Smoodin, The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia

TSPDT Rank: 89
Essential Films:
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
House of Strangers
A Letter to Three Wives
All About Eve
The Barefoot Contessa

Biggest Fans:
Miguel (6)
bonnielaurel (16)


79) Terry Gilliam
150.1 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 320x280]http://cdn.denofgeek.us/sites/denofgeek ... heorem.jpg[/imgsize]
"Terry Gilliam is best known for films that inventively combine the gothic and romantic. His trademark soaring flights of fantasy are often set to attack dogged rationality and grey-minded bureaucracy." - Tanya Krzywinska, Contemporary North American Film Directors

TSPDT Rank: 135
Essential Films:
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Time Bandits
Brazil
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Twelve Monkeys

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (17)


78) Theo Angelopoulos
150.6 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://www.toimg.net/managed/images/101 ... /image.jpg[/imgsize]
"Theodoros Angelopoulos’s considerable achievements in cinema during the 1970s and 1980s have made him not only the most important Greek filmmaker to date, but one of the truly creative and original artists of his time… If his style shows some influences—particularly Jancsó’s one reel-one take methodology and Antonioni’s slow, meditative mood—Angelopoulos has nevertheless created an authentic epic cinema akin to Brecht’s theatre in which aesthetic emotion is counterbalanced by a reflexive approach that questions the surfaces of reality. The audience is not allowed to identify with a central character, nor to follow a dramatic development, nor given a reassuring morality." - Michel Ciment, International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers

TSPDT Rank: 83
Essential Films:
The Travelling Players
Landscape in the Mist
The Suspended Step of the Stork
Ulysses' Gaze
Eternity and a Day

Biggest Fans:
Jirin (5)


77) Mike Leigh
152.9 points / 6 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://www.filmreference.com/images/sjff_02_img0742.jpg[/imgsize]
"Leigh at his best is an acute, incisive observer of working- and lower-middle-class behaviour and mores... Meantime, Naked (his most irascibly honest, revealing and cinematically sophisticated film) and much of the admittedly very affecting Secrets and Lies succeed gloriously as perceptive, witty, warts-and-all studies of a particular way of London life." - Geoff Andrew, The Director's Vision

TSPDT Rank: 140
Essential Films:
Meantime
Life is Sweet
Naked
Secrets & Lies
Topsy-Turvy

Biggest Fans:
Gillingham (9)
Charlie Driggs (19)


76) David Lean
156.3 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 420x280]http://schaumburglibrary.org/movies/fil ... gt_exp.jpg[/imgsize]
"All of his films, no matter how small or large their dimensions, demonstrate an obsessive cultivation of craft, a fastidious concern with production detail that defines the "quality" postwar British cinema. That craft and concern are as hyperbolic in their devices as is the medium itself. Viewers surprised at the attention to detail and composition in Ryan's Daughter, a work whose scope would appear to call for a more modest approach, had really not paid attention to the truly enormous dimensions of Brief Encounter, a film that defines, for many, intimist cinema." - Charles Affron, The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia

TSPDT Rank: 27
Essential Films:
Brief Encounter
Great Expectations
Summertime
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Lawrence of Arabia

Biggest Fans:
bonnielaurel (10)

[JimmyJazz]

Time to unveil the next quarter of our list today...

75) Spike Jonze
165.4 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 280x280]http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vultu ... _560x0.jpg[/imgsize]
"Throughout his varied career, Spike Jonze quickly established himself as a director whose remarkable vision and prolific output led to creating some of the most memorable films and music videos of his day." - Turner Classic Movies

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
Music Videos
Being John Malkovich
Adaptation.
Her

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (14)


74) Elia Kazan
168.6 points / 7 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://www.nndb.com/people/537/000026459/eliakazan.jpg[/imgsize]
"Individual will struggling powerfully against another person, family, society—this is Elia Kazan’s view of the world that infuses his films. Kazan in his time was the most celebrated director of theatre and film in the United States. …Although his reputation was tarnished and career ruined by his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, his work as a director is unique in American film. His director’s idea, that drama is life, infuses his work with a rawness that makes his films stand apart." - Ken Dancyger, The Director's Idea: The Path to Great Directing

TSDPT Rank: 81
Essential Films:
A Streetcar Named Desire
On the Waterfront
East of Eden
Splendor in the Grass
America, America

Biggest Fans:
stone37 (12)
Chambord (14)


73) Brian De Palma
168.9 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 280x280]http://www.avoir-alire.com/IMG/arton4569.jpg?1353011962[/imgsize]
"Brian De Palma is the most controversial director to have emerged from the movie brat generation of film school graduates. A misogynist, a genius, a copycat, a cine-literate aesthete, an emotionless technician, all of these epithets have been thrown his way - and they all have some validity." - Lloyd Hughes, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 102
Essential Films:
Carrie
Dressed to Kill
Blow Out
Scarface
Carlito's Way

Biggest Fans:
bonnielaurel (6)
Stephan (14)


72) William Wyler
172 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://www.nndb.com/people/463/00003236 ... -sized.jpg[/imgsize]
"There was a time when William Wyler was hailed as one of the finest of all directors, praised for his use of deep-focus cinematography and long, unbroken takes. Today his reputation has declined - a filmmaker dethroned by critical fashion, damned for those very qualities for which he was once lauded. His restraint has come to be seen as impersonality, his good taste as complacency, his seriousness as pomposity, his technical skill and lucidity as bland... Whatever the genre or the scale, Wyler never brought to any of his films less than impeccable craftsmanship." - Philip Kemp, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 94
Essential Films:
Dodsworth
The Little Foxes
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Heiress
Roman Holiday

Biggest Fans:
whuntva (9)
bonnielaurel (12)
Chambord (20)


71) Rob Reiner
172.4 points / 6 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://www.nndb.com/people/784/00002471 ... -sized.jpg[/imgsize]
“Thus, from the beginning of Reiner's career, several elements become apparent that are important to his development as a director: 1) a profound sympathy for the actor and the concomitant empathy to elicit skillful performances; 2) a deep understanding of comedy and satire and, more generally, an innate feel for timing and structure; and 3) an inherently liberal, humanistic sensibility.” – Charles Derry, Film Reference

TSPDT Rank: 160
Essential Films:
This Is Spinal Tap
Stand by Me
The Princess Bride

Biggest Fans:
PlasticRam (5)
Henrik (14)

[JimmyJazz]

70) Peter Jackson
174.4 points / 6 votes
[imgsize 420x280]http://images.smh.com.au/ftsmh/ffximage ... x313,0.jpg[/imgsize]
"Jackson's career had moved full circle by the 1990s: he had shifted from making low-budget, cult New Zealand movies to crafting high-budget, cult New Zealand movies. Not only are his latter day films in much better taste than his earlier bad taste outings, but by adapting Tolkien's cult novels, and remaking a Hollywood cult movie of the 1930s, Jackson has cleverly guaranteed that he can conform to the mainstream, yet can still maintain a loyal cult following." - Matt Hills, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 220
Essential Films:
Bad Taste
Braindead
Heavenly Creatures
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
King Kong

Biggest Fans:
Liveinphoenix (4)


69) Eric Rohmer
174.6 points / 4 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Gua ... er-015.jpg[/imgsize]
"Eric Rohmer... was one of the founding figures of the French New Wave and the director of more than 50 films, including the Oscar-nominated My Night at Maud’s... In opposition both to the intensely personal, confessional tone of much of the work of Truffaut and to the politically provocative films of Godard, Mr. Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet Mr. Rohmer’s work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films." - Dave Kehr, The New York Times

TSPDT Rank: 79
Essential Films:
La Collectionneuse
My Night at Maud's
Claire's Knee
The Marquis of O
The Green Ray

Biggest Fans:
Chambord (9)
Miguel (9)
JimmyJazz (14)


68) Aki Kaurismäki
176.1 points / 6 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://app.letemps.ch/rw/Le_Temps/Quoti ... ISMAKI.jpg[/imgsize]
"Kaurismäki's finest work celebrates resilience and (more rarely) the supportive power of love, while sharply but gently acknowledging through detailed, deadpan comic observation the absurdity of vanity." - Geoff Andrew, The Director's Vision

TSPDT Rank: 217
Essential Films:
The Match Factory Girl
Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana
Drifting Clouds
The Man Without a Past
Le Havre

Biggest Fans:
Petri (7)
Henrik (20)


67) Michael Mann
182.4 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://nathanditum.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/mann.jpg[/imgsize]
"His work stands alongside that of Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Schrader, and Martin Scorsese for its study of masculinity and particular focus on the professional male's uneasy negotiations with society. Formally daring, his films are rarely sentimental or overtly emotional; attempting to mine the consciousness of his characters, he offers complex, but emotionally disengaged, personality studies." - Ian Haydn Smith, Contemporary North American Film Directors

TSPDT Rank: 163
Essential Films:
Thief
The Last of the Mohicans
Heat
The Insider
Public Enemies

Biggest Fans:
stone37 (4)
bootsy (18)


66) Ridley Scott
183.3 points / 7 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://www.iknowtoday.com/wp-content/up ... .-jane.jpg[/imgsize]
"Detractors consider him a stylish hack, someone capable of dressing up feces. But supporters contend that it is this same talent for rendering the everyday extraordinary that lends him truly awesome storytelling power. Never a shy filmmaker, Scott's cinema reveals characters and situations that are never what they appear at first glance." - Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 48
Essential Films:
Alien
Blade Runner
Thelma & Louise
Gladiator
Black Hawk Down

Biggest Fans:
bootsy (15)
Stephan (17)

[JimmyJazz]

65) John Cassavetes
194.1 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 240x280]http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/07/76/27/20 ... 28x471.jpg[/imgsize]
“John Cassavetes’ emotionally naked human dramas are benchmarks of American independent cinema. Having started out in New York as an actor, Cassavetes brought to his directorial efforts the same kinetic, heightened realism that marked his film and theater roles—a wily danger, the sense that at any moment things could explode from the inside. Shadows (1959), the first film he directed, self-financed for a mere $40,000, didn’t find much of an audience upon its small initial release, but it garnered Cassavetes some notice from critics (including a Venice Film Festival Critics Prize)—as well as studios, resulting in a couple of impersonal projects in the 1960s. He dove back into personal filmmaking later in the decade with the devastating domestic drama Faces (1968). Though hardly a crowd-pleaser, that film—made, like Shadows, wholly independently—was an art-house success, resulting in three Oscar nominations. From that point on, Cassavetes was synonymous with uncompromising, anti-studio American fare, working with a rotating cast of brilliant actors like Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, and, of course, his wife, Gena Rowlands, to touch raw nerves with such films as A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1976).” – The Criterion Collection

TSPDT Rank: 36
Essential Films:
Shadows
Faces
A Woman Under the Influence
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Love Streams

Biggest Fans:
Chambord (10)


64) Clint Eastwood
195.7 points / 7 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/ ... stwood.jpg[/imgsize]
"He has used the control over his films to fashion one of the longest and most fascinating examinations of masculinity in American cinema, especially with respect to themes of individuality, violence, and more recently, ageing. Furthermore, this masculinity has been inseparable from the national culture in which it is conceived, with Eastwood's films consistently exploring his country's myths and legends through such emblematically American genres as the western, the road movie and the action film." - Andrew Snyder, Contemporary North American Film Directors

TSPDT Rank: 101
Essential Films:
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Unforgiven
A Perfect World
The Bridges of Madison County
Letters from Iwo Jima

Biggest Fans:
Miguel (4)
bootsy (16)


63) John Huston
197.3 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://www.asharperfocus.com/images/Huston01.jpg[/imgsize]
"Huston's skill as a director was always that the emotions in his films, whether love, fear, hatred, determination, holiness, greed or desperation, seemed genuinely felt, and he extracted some extraordinarily deep performances from actors not previously noted for extreme mobility." - David Quinlan, Quinlan's Film Directors

TSPDT Rank: 53
Essential Films:
The Maltese Falcon
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Asphalt Jungle
Fat City
The Dead

Biggest Fans:
bonnielaurel (7)
Stephan (12)


62) Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
205.6 points / 8 votes NOTE: In the case of this entry, I got a lot of votes for both Powell as a solo director and the Archers as a filmmaking duo. For this reason, I chose to count them as a single entry, figuring most people voted for Powell's work with Pressburger, as opposed to all of his solo work as well.
[imgsize 430x280]http://www.takeonecff.com/wordpress/wp- ... wpress.jpg[/imgsize]
“Raymond Durgnat has discussed the difficulty of placing the remarkable work of the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger within conventional ideas of auteurism: “They fit awkwardly into film theory, since Powell, though a true auteur, often thought more like an impresario, or a producer, who draws ideas from a team of collaborators.” Durgnat’s description of Powell and Pressburger is both apt and illustrative of the impure, synthetic, spectacular, consistent and combinatory nature of their work. Both had careers separate from this collaboration – Powell worked his way up through the British film industry working with Rex Ingram, Hitchcock briefly, and as a director of ‘quota quickies’ in the 1930s, while Pressburger worked as a screenwriter at the mighty German studio UFA before fleeing to England after the rise of the Nazis – but it is the films they made together from 1939 (The Spy in Black) until the disbandment of their production company, The Archers, in 1957 that constitute their greatest overall contribution to world cinema. Powell in particular made great, interesting and even groundbreaking films (such as The Edge of the World [1937] and Peeping Tom [1960]) outside of this collaboration, but the string of works made back to back from 1943-1950 (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943], A Canterbury Tale [1944], “I Know Where I’m Going!” [1945], A Matter of Life and Death [1946], Black Narcissus [1947], The Red Shoes [1948], The Small Back Room [1949] and Gone to Earth [1950]) are their towering achievement. Even within the context of the golden period of British cinema in the late 1940s, Powell and Pressburger’s films are both exemplary and aesthetically unique, while still being quintessentially English.” – Adrian Danks, Senses of Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 33
Essential Films:
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
A Matter of Life and Death
Black Narcissus
The Red Shoes
Peeping Tom

Biggest Fans:
Henrik (18)
JimmyJazz (19)


61) Tim Burton
205.8 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 300x280]http://narrativeinart.files.wordpress.c ... urton1.jpg[/imgsize]
"By allowing audiences to make journeys to the dark side - albeit with a safety net of Burton's playful sense of the quirky and emotional sensibility - he has proved that the macabre can be both popular and profitable." - Ian Freer, Movie Makers

TSPDT Rank: 193
Essential Films:
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
Edward Scissorhands
Batman Returns
Ed Wood
Sweeney Todd

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (9)
Miguel (14)

[JimmyJazz]

Everybody feel free to discuss the ongoing results, and even speculate about how certain directors are going to do and place! It is awfully quite around here...

[JimmyJazz]

60) Jim Jarmusch
207.7 points / 6 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://filmlinc.files.wordpress.com/200 ... dez262.jpg[/imgsize]
"Jarmusch's elliptical, dedramatised, episodic narrative style is symptomatic of his restlessly experimental interest in the method and structure of cinematic storytelling. Crucially, however, this interest in formalism - which makes him unlikely to ever join the Hollywood mainstream - is balanced by subtle wit, the warmth he clearly feels for his characters and a bemused, intelligent interest in the unfamiliar backroads of American life, so that he remains one of the most accessible, original and influential of that country's independent film-makers." - Geoff Andrew, The Director's Vision

TSPDT Rank: 117
Essential Films:
Stranger Than Paradise
Down by Law
Mystery Train
Dead Man
Only Lovers Left Alive

Biggest Fans:
pauldrach (7)
Greg (14)


59) Jean-Pierre Melville
209.1 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 400x280]http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/m/e/ ... e-01-g.jpg[/imgsize]
"Melville gained most fame for such dry, laconic gangster films as Bob le flambeur (1955), Le Doulos (1962), Second Breath (1966), and Le Samourai (1967). Expressionless men in trenchcoats and snap-brim hats stalk through gray streets to meet in piano bars. Almost completely impassive, they behave as if they have watched too many Hollywood films noirs -driving American sedans, pledging loyalty to their pals, dividing duties for a caper they intend to pull. Melville dwells on long silences as gunmen size each other up, stare at their reflections, or stoically realize that a deal has failed. The films teem with bravura techniques - hand-held camerawork, long takes, and available-light shooting… Melville loved to watch movies. ("Being a spectator is the finest profession in the world.") Many of his films are tributes to American cinema, and he brought to French film some of the audacious energy of Hollywood B pictures. If Renoir fathered the New Wave, Melville was its godfather." - Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell , Film History: An Introduction

TSPDT Rank: 82
Essential Films:
Bob le flambeur
Second Breath
Le Samourai
Army of Shadows
The Red Circle

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (8)
Stephan (13)


58) Kenji Mizoguchi
221.3 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_product ... 1337455033[/imgsize]
"Often named as one of Japan’s three most important filmmakers (alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu), Kenji Mizoguchi created a cinema rich in technical mastery and social commentary, specifically regarding the place of women in Japanese society. After an upbringing marked by poverty and abuse, Mizoguchi found solace in art, trying his hand at both oil painting and theater set design before, at the age of twenty-two in 1920, enrolling as an assistant director at Nikkatsu studios. By the midthirties, he had developed his craft by directing dozens of movies in a variety of genres, but he would later say that he didn’t consider his career to have truly begun until 1936, with the release of the companion films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, about women both professionally and romantically trapped. Japanese film historian Donald Richie called Gion “one of the best Japanese films ever made.” Over the next decade, Mizoguchi made such wildly different tours de force as The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), The 47 Ronin (1941–42), and Women of the Night (1948), but not until 1952 did he break through internationally, with The Life of Oharu, a poignant tale of a woman’s downward spiral in an unforgiving society. That film paved the road to half a decade of major artistic and financial successes for Mizoguchi, including the masterful ghost story Ugetsu (1953) and the gut-wrenching drama Sansho the Bailiff (1954), both flaunting extraordinarily sophisticated compositions and camera movement. The last film Mizoguchi made before his death at age fifty-eight was Street of Shame (1956), a shattering exposé set in a bordello that directly led to the outlawing of prostitution in Japan. Few filmmakers can claim to have had such impact." - The Criterion Collection

TSPDT Rank: 25
Essential Films:
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums
Life of Oharu
Ugetsu monogatari
Sansho Dayu
Chikamatsu monogatari

Biggest Fans:
Jirin (3)
JimmyJazz (10)
BleuPanda (16)


57) David Cronenberg
226.2 points / 11 votes
[imgsize 200x280]https://awestruckwanderer.files.wordpre ... /david.jpg[/imgsize]
"Horror for Cronenberg is not a game or a meal ticket; it is, rather, the natural expression for one of the best directors working today. For Cronenberg's subject is the intensity of human frailty and decay: in short, the boy and its many accelerated mutations, whether out of disease, anger, dread, or hope. These are not easy films to take. But how can horror be easy? Anyone born and reckoning on dying needs to confront Cronenberg." - David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

TSPDT Rank: 87
Essential Films:
Videodrome
The Fly
Dead Ringers
Crash
A History of Violence

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (16)
BleuPanda (20)


56) Jacques Tati
226.4 points / 7 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://www.filmreference.com/images/sjff_02_img0869.jpg[/imgsize]
"He is one of the handful of film artists - the others would include Griffith, Eisenstein, Murnau, Bresson - who can be said to have transformed the medium at its most basic level, to have found a new way of seeing... Five films in 25 years is not an impressive record in a medium where stature is often measured by prolificity, but Playtime alone is a lifetime's achievement - a film that liberates and revitalizes the act of looking at the world." - Dave Kehr, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers

TSPDT Rank: 54
Essential Films:
Jour de fete
M. Hulot's Holiday
Mon Oncle
Playtime
Traffic

Biggest Fans:
Romain (5)
Henrik (19)

[JimmyJazz]

Last batch of five for the day, folks. Starting tomorrow, I will gradually unveil three directors at a time instead of five, in order to keep the suspense going as we enter the Top 50!

55) James Cameron
236.4 points / 5 votes
[imgsize 380x280]https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005 ... b03c6e.jpg[/imgsize]
"There is certainly something totalitarian to Cameron's gargantuan budget expenditures and well-documented rampaging ego... But there's also no doubting his films' massive popularity, their technical innovation and bravado, or their action-thrill quotient." - Jessica Winter, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 106
Essential Films:
The Terminator
Aliens
The Abyss
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Avatar

Biggest Fans:
bootsy (3)
stone37 (5)
Chambord (18)


54) François Truffaut
240.1 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MmAu63tddkQ/U ... uffaut.jpg[/imgsize]
"Truffaut remained true to the Cahiers legacy by inserting into each film references to his favorite periods of film history and his admired directors (Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Renoir). Jules and Jim, set in the early days of cinema, provided an occasion to incorporate silent footage and to employ old -fashioned irises. Truffaut sought not to destroy traditional cinema but to renew it. In the Cahiers spirit he aimed to enrich commercial filmmaking by balancing personal expression with a concern for his audience: "I have to feel I am producing a piece of entertainment." - Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction

TSPDT Rank: 23
Essential Films:
The 400 Blows
Shoot the Piano Player
Jules et Jim
The Wild Child
Day for Night

Biggest Fans:
Romain (8)
bonnielaurel (17)


53) Wes Anderson
260.4 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 430x280]http://tstmkr.tv/wp-content/uploads/201 ... derson.jpg[/imgsize]
"With a distinctive visual style that steers clear of the gross plagiarism of many post-Tarantino thirty-something directors, Anderson sets himself apart from most of his contemporaries. His work is as refreshing and visually inspiring as any Coen brothers' film and restores faith in the idea that Hollywood can still produce an idiosyncratic black comedy once in a while." - Peter Homden, Contemporary North American Film Directors

TSPDT Rank: 249
Essential Films:
Bottle Rocket
Rushmore
The Royal Tenenbaums
Moonrise Kingdom
The Grand Budapest Hotel

Biggest Fans:
Maschine Man (3)
pauldrach (10)
BleuPanda (9)


52) Pedro Almodóvar
261.5 points / 10 votes
[imgsize 450x280]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/pro ... ar.583.jpg[/imgsize]
"Pedro Almodóvar is often compared to Luis Buñuel, but Almodóvar is both more of a populist and a humanist filmmaker. Almodóvar himself has remarked, "The characters in my films are assassins, rapists, and so on, but I don't treat them as criminals, I talk about their humanity." And that is true, but he does so in the most playfully outrageous ways imaginable. Almodóvar's films are very much movies that are filled with colour and spectacular moments, and that revel in the sheer joy of filmmaking. Many of his early films are set in Madrid but things that happen in his films are invariably glamorized into the fabulous à la Hollywood form." - Ken Hanke, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 107
Essential Films:
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
All About My Mother
Talk to Her
Bad Education
Volver

Biggest Fans:
bonnielaurel (11)
Petri (12)
Henrik (15)


51) Frank Capra
261.8 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/wp-con ... capra3.jpg[/imgsize]
"At a time when Hollywood hardly looked outside its studios, Frank Capra crafted a unique combination of social commentary and slapstick caprioles. Populist and humanist, uplifting, fast, and funny, Capra's creations are among Hollywood's most memorable movies and are nostalgically treasured and ritually reviewed as true cult classics." - Ernest Mathijs, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 64
Essential Films:
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
It Happened One Night
Lost Horizon
Arsenic and Old Lace
It's a Wonderful Life

Biggest Fans:
pauldrach (12)
Henrik (17)
bonnielaurel (20)
Stephan (20)

[whuntva]

Good list. I now kinda wish I submitted more than 10. In my defense, I was in a hurry, so I could not really think of too many directors off the top of my head.

But I reognize most of the names and have seen most of the movies. Looking forward to the Top 50!

[BleuPanda]

I really need to watch something by Jarmusch, I've never heard of his films outside of here and TSPDT.

It's been a pretty good list so far. Was expecting Wes Anderson to be a bit higher, but still a great placement. Good to see Almodovar get good representation.

[JimmyJazz]

I really need to watch something by Jarmusch, I've never heard of his films outside of here and TSPDT.

It's been a pretty good list so far. Was expecting Wes Anderson to be a bit higher, but still a great placement. Good to see Almodovar get good representation.

Jarmusch's movies are incredible, I can assure you. I would probably start with his 80s stuff first if I were you, like Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law specifically. My favorite film of his though, and one of my all-time favorite movies, is Dead Man, which Jonathan Rosenbaum once called the ultimate "acid Western" and that label completely fits. Other definite must sees from him include Mystery Train, which is his delightful tribute to 50s American Rock music, from the most unusual of characters, and Ghost Dog, which is his tribute to both Japanese cinema and culture as well as hip-hop (specifically the Wu Tang Clan!) Only Lovers Left Alive, his vampire romance film from last year, is also wonderful.

I was definitely expecting Wes Anderson to place in the Top 50 as well. I now regret not placing him on my Top 100, somewhat, but there are a number of auteurs I love too, so he currently sits on my 25 runner ups instead.

I am also shocked at the rather low placement for Mizoguchi and Powell & Pressburger though. Such masters...

[Rob]

I am also shocked at the rather low placement for Mizoguchi and Powell & Pressburger though. Such masters...

I don't know about everywhere else in the world, but the reason I'm not too familiar with Mizoguchi is simply because his work is pretty much unavailable around here. I don't think his movies ever had a home release here, be it VHS, dvd, blu-ray or video on demand. Honestly, I feel lucky to have been able to see his two most famous works: Sansho the Bailiff and Ugetsu, though both not exactly recently. I didn't vote for him based on those two. Ugetsu was very good, but although I appreciated the visual artistry of Sansho, I rarely love melodrama and Sansho falls a bit too much in that genre for my tastes.

Edward Yang has it even worse around here. As far as I know Yi Yi is the only movie that came ever near this country,though at least I thought that was a great picture. The US has a far better availability of movies I think. Having said that, I have seen at least one movie of every director ranked up til now and I suspect that to remain the case. There are just a handful of which I haven't been able to look more into, including Yang and Mizoguchi. I have seen most Powell and Pressburger (they were 23 on my list though) and Jarmush (bubbling under my top 50, though that still means I like him a lot).

To me the biggest surprise is the appearance of Rob Reiner. I like his 80's and early '90's output and This Is Spinal Tap is one of the funniest movies I know, but even in his best works I find it hard to discover a personal stamp. This is no disaster if he makes good films, but to rank among all these other names I think he should have a little more to offer. Besides, after A Few Good Man I think he didn't really make anything interesting anymore.

Good to see Kaurismäki. Didn't think he stood a chance.

[Henrik]

Great list and presentation, Jimmyjazz!

I voted for Powell primarily because of Peeping Tom, so I'd really like to see it among the essential films.

[DDD troll account]

Yeah, great presentation so far, Jimmy! Seven directors so far from the top 50 I submitted (eight if we count Cukor's cameo appearance), which is not too bad I guess, though I still have high hopes for the bulk of the rest in my, say, top 34.

Pretty good list so far with a lot of cool directors here that I didn't vote for because I had only seen one film (Yang, Mizoguchi, Kaurismäki) or even less (of these I'm most intrigued by Rohmer so far). My own cut-off was at a minimum of two films I should have seen by each director and even then both films should have been all-time favorites (Cassavetes, Clouzot, Truffaut all missed just barely). Pretty cool mix of anglophone and rest-of-the-world directors and also quite diverse in terms of era though there seems to be a clear tendency towards post-1945 cinema (which I am very guilty of myself).

[PlasticRam]

Great presentation, thanks for your work JimmyJazz!

I wish I had listed more than ten directors too, I like Kaurismäki and he's Finnish like me.

[JimmyJazz]

Thanks for all the compliments, guys! I also added "Peeping Tom" to Powell & Pressburger's "Essential Films" section, per Henrik's suggestion!

Onto the Top 50!

50) Ang Lee
262.2 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 450x280]http://videoandfilmmaker.com/wp/wp-cont ... ng-Lee.png[/imgsize]
"From being an art-house favourite, Ang Lee made an extraordinary leap to become a major studio director after only three films. He has demonstrated the crowd-pleasing touch in his character-driven studies of human nature." - Ronald Bergan, Film - Eyewitness Companions)

TSPDT Rank: 158
Essential Films:
Sense and Sensibility
The Ice Storm
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Brokeback Mountain
Life of Pi

Biggest Fans:
PlasticRam (8)
bootsy (13)
Henrik (13)
Charlie Driggs (18)


49) Wong Kar-wai
262.9 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 450x280]http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uplo ... a-2011.jpg[/imgsize]
"Wong’s avant-garde filmic aesthetic is composed of elliptical storytelling through the use of deeply drenched tones, slow motion, jump cuts and fragmented images. Although the notion of auteur is not entirely customary in Hong Kong where films are often shot quickly and marketed via their accessibility as popular entertainment, Wong’s status as auteur marks his position within Hong Kong cinema’s industrial environment and signifies his complete creative freedom and control of every facet of his films’ production." - Elizabeth Wright, Senses of Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 42
Essential Films:
Days of Being Wild
Chungking Express
Happy Together
In the Mood for Love
2046

Biggest Fans:
Jirin (10)
McJagger (15)


48) Richard Linklater
269.5 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 400x280]http://d1oi7t5trwfj5d.cloudfront.net/a1 ... ective.jpg[/imgsize]
"In Linklater’s films, words are action. They express personality, identity, conflict, attraction, rejection, sympathy, alienation, affection, evasion, disclosure, and concealment. Mostly, they represent attempts to make sense of the world, to understand people and places and events, and an individual’s relationship to all of those things. Many of the riffs are funny, some are disturbing and some are just nuts—Linklater shows an uncondescending interest in the things that genuinely crazy people say, the possible insights they enfold and the range of discomforts they provoke." - Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film

TSPDT Rank: 199
Essential Films:
Dazed & Confused
The "Before" Trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight)
Waking Life
Bernie
Boyhood

Biggest Fans:
whuntva (10)
Gillingham (16)
Maschine Man (18)

[JimmyJazz]

47) Wim Wenders
276 points / 10 votes
[imgsize 220x280]http://medias.unifrance.org/medias/138/ ... enders.jpg[/imgsize]
"Of the three young German filmmakers who achieved the greatest international fame in the 1970s as the vanguard of a German New Wave, Wim Wenders had perhaps a less radical though no less distinctive film style than his compatriots R. W. Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. Though critics typically cite American influences upon Wenders’s ‘‘road trilogy’’ of the mid-1970s, there is a greater affinity with the modernist tradition of the European ‘‘art film’’ exemplified by the Antonioni of L’avventura and Red Desert—dramas of alienation in which restless, unrooted individuals wander through haunted, sterile, but bleakly beautiful landscapes within a free-floating narrative structure." - Joseph Milicia, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers)

TSPDT Rank: 74
Essential Films:
Alice in the Cities
Kings of the Road
The American Friend
Paris, Texas
Wings of Desire

Biggest Fans:
Greg (7)
pauldrach (16)
Michel (18)


46) Yasujiro Ozu
278 points / 7 votes
[imgsize 500x280]http://cdn.filmschoolrejects.com/images ... ro-ozu.jpg[/imgsize]
"Of the great Japanese directors, Yasujiro Ozu is often cited as the most authentically Japanese, his work a byword for cool austerity. Scorning such vulgar devices as fades, dissolves, tracking shots, or pans, he shoots with a largely unmoving camera, almost always from about three feet above the ground - roughly the eye line, it has often been noted, of someone sitting cross-legged on a tatami mat." - Philip Kemp, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 11
Essential Films:
I Was Born, But...
Late Spring
Early Summer
Tokyo Story
An Autumn Afternoon

Biggest Fans:
JimmyJazz (5)
Jirin (13)
Petri (13)
McJagger (14)
Rob (19)


45) Michael Haneke
278.1 points / 10 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://medias.unifrance.org/medias/230/ ... haneke.jpg[/imgsize]
"A stern, imposing figure, Austrian Michael Haneke was the dominant filmmaker to emerge to prominence in Europe in the 1990s, probably more influential even than the universally acclaimed Krzysztof Kieslowski. His films are rigorous and cerebral modernist texts, but they're also often provocative and controversial in their unsparing depiction of the modern condition." - Tom Charity, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 97
Essential Films:
Funny Games
Code Unknown
Cache
The White Ribbon
Amour

Biggest Fans:
Henrik (7)
BleuPanda (14)
pauldrach (19)

[JimmyJazz]

44) Milos Forman
279.4 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://www.filmreference.com/images/sjff_02_img0668.jpg[/imgsize]
"Milos Forman stands as one of the few established foreign directors to find consistent success within the American film industry. Like Fritz Lang, Forman was an influential filmmaker in his homeland who went on to achieve equal influence in Hollywood." - Jeffrey Klenotic, The Virgin International Encyclopedia of Film

TSPDT Rank: 91
Essential Films:
Loves of a Blonde
The Firemen's Ball
Taking Off
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Amadeus

Biggest Fans:
PlasticRam (3)
bootsy (17)
Petri (20)


43) Michelangelo Antonioni
284.5 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://mirahashmi.files.wordpress.com/2 ... -rocca.jpg[/imgsize]
“Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties and fifties, it was in the 1960s that he became a major force in international film. It was also then that he began to typify, alongside such artists as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, a new European art cinema, expressing a distinctly contemporary ennui. With their stunning visuals, ambiguous narratives, and still relevant focus on modern alienation, Antonioni’s films of this period, all starring Monica Vitti, his lover at the time—L’avventura (famously booed at Cannes for confounding its audience with its longueurs and lack of closure), La notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert—have stood the test of time. And his less iconic later films, like Identification of a Woman, have only grown more compelling and mysterious as the years have passed.” – The Criterion Collection

TSPDT Rank: 20
Essential Films:
L'Avventura
La Notte
L'Eclisse
Blowup
The Passenger

Biggest Fans:
Jirin (8)
Charlie Driggs (16)
Michel (16)


42) Rainer Werner Fassbinder
285.3 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 400x280]http://i2.listal.com/image/1103689/600f ... binder.jpg[/imgsize]
"One of the finest directors working in the '70s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder ranged widely through genre and style, but consistent through his prolific career (he made over 40 films in 13 years) was an ironic approach towards often melodramatic subjects, and an abiding interest in the despair underlying the material affluence and bourgeois moral conformism of postwar German society." - Geoff Andrew, The Film Handbook

TSPDT Rank: 52
Essential Films:
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
In a Year with 13 Moons
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Berlin Alexanderplatz

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (5)
Greg (11)
McJagger (12)
pauldrach (13)

[JimmyJazz]

41) Alain Resnais
300.3 points / 10 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://www.mutanteggplant.com/vitro-nas ... erique.jpg[/imgsize]
“A legendary figure in French cinema, Alain Resnais has created some of the most important and indelible films of the postwar era. In a career spanning over sixty years, Resnais has exhaustively explored the complex relationships between time and memory, truth and the subjectivity of the human mind. Intellectually rigorous, his films nonetheless remain immensely watchable, buoyed by a lightness of touch and a sheer beauty that effortlessly communicates the dreamlike interior of the mind.” – Harvard Film Archive

TSPDT Rank: 37
Essential Films:
Night and Fog
Hiroshima, mon amour
Last Year at Marienbad
Muriel
Providence

Biggest Fans:
Chambord (3)
Romain (7)


40) Jean Renoir
300.4 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 280x280]http://elcultural.es/blogs/el-incomodad ... _11221.jpg[/imgsize]
"The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was also a master of his medium: cinema. After making his mark in the early thirties with two very different films, the anarchic send-up of the bourgeoisie Boudu Saved from Drowning and the popular-front Gorky adaptation The Lower Depths, Renoir closed out the decade with two critical humanistic studies of French society that routinely turn up on lists of the greatest films ever made: Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game (the former was celebrated in its time, but the latter was trashed by critics and audiences—until history provided vindication). After a brief, unfulfilling Hollywood stint during World War II, Renoir traveled to India to make his first Technicolor film, The River, and then returned to Europe in the early fifties to direct three visually dazzling explorations of theater, The Golden Coach, French Cancan, and Elena and Her Men. Renoir persisted in his cinematic pursuits until the late sixties, when, after the completion of The Little Theater of Jean Renoir, a collection of three short films, he decided to dedicate himself solely to writing, leaving the future of the medium to those who looked to him in reverence." - The Criterion Collection

TSPDT Rank: 7
Essential Films:
The Crime of Monsieur Lange
Partie de campagne
La Grande illusion
The Rules of the Game
The River

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (6)
JimmyJazz (6)
Harold (10)


39) Buster Keaton
308.2 points / 10 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://www.wicked-halo.com/wp-content/u ... keaton.jpg[/imgsize]
"Joseph Francis Keaton is arguably the greatest film comedian the world has ever known. What is perhaps less commonly recognised is that he was also one of cinema's greatest directors: unlike most comics, he displayed a masterly, apparently intuitive grasp of the possibilities of film, both before and behind the camera." - Geoff Andrew, The Film Handbook

TSPDT Rank: 47
Essential Films:
Our Hospitality
Sherlock Jr.
The Navigator
The General
Steamboat Bill Jr.

Biggest Fans:
Rob (7)
Greg (10)
Chambord (15)
JimmyJazz (16)
Miguel (19)

[DDD troll account]

Kinda surprised to see Ozu and Renoir this low. I voted for neither (still haven't seen any Ozu, shame on me) but they are both directors with a big following among cineasts. It just seems like they should have been higher.

[JimmyJazz]

38) F. W. Murnau
309.8 points / 10 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://www.filmreference.com/images/sjff_02_img0783.jpg[/imgsize]
"He made 17 films in Germany, and a final four in America. Of these, only 12 survive. They form a body of work as startling, and as compelling, as any in cinema. Murnau is hard to pin down. His work has no unifying theme; what runs through it all is an attitude to the image on the screen and to what it can express. There is a sense of life in the whole of every frame." - The Illustrated Who's Who of Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 19
Essential Films:
Nosferatu
The Last Laugh
Sunrise
City Girl
Tabu

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (9)
Chambord (12)
Rob (17)
Harold (19)
Jirin (20)


37) Ernst Lubitsch
316 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://www.ciakhollywood.com/biografie/ ... bitsch.jpg[/imgsize]
"Lubitsch was always the least Germanic of German directors, as Lang was the most Germanic. The critics were always so obsessed with what Lubitsch naughtily left off the screen that they never fully evaluated what was left on... Lubitsch was the last of the genuine continentals let loose on the American continent, and we shall never see his like again because the world he celebrated had died - even before he did - everywhere except in his own memory." - Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 38
Essential Films:
Trouble in Paradise
Angel
The Shop Around the Corner
To Be or Not to Be
Heaven Can Wait

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (3)
Michel (6)
pauldrach (18)
Greg (19)


36) Béla Tarr
332 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 200x280]https://adferoafferro.files.wordpress.c ... a-tarr.jpg[/imgsize]
"Indebted to Tarkovsky and his countryman Miklós Jancsó, Tarr began as a maker of piercing, social-realist dramas focused on the desperate lives of the proletariat class, before achieving auteur superstardom in the 1990s for a series of black-and-white, Communist-era allegories made in close partnership with novelist László Krasznahorkai (Damnation, Satantango, Werckmeister Harmonies). Each of the later films is marked by Tarr’s celebrated use of long, elaborately choreographed tracking shots in which camera and actors seem locked in a hypnotic dance—ravishing cinema that demands to be seen on the largest possible screens." - Film Society Lincoln Center

TSPDT Rank: 71
Essential Films:
Almanac of Fall
Damnation
Satantango
Werckmeister Harmonies
The Turin Horse

Biggest Fans:
Jirin (4)
Chambord (7)
Gillingham (10)
McJagger (11)

[JimmyJazz]

35) Christopher Nolan
335.3 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 450x280]http://images.fandango.com/images/fanda ... lan500.jpg[/imgsize]
"Nolan imbues vivid artistic sensibilities into films that are positioned as mainstream entertainment, as seen with the imagery and cinematic choices that abound in the Batman series and Inception, with scenes resembling surreal paintings given life. Nolan's choices have significantly influenced filmmaking, proving that complexity can exist in the commercial." - Biography.com

TSPDT Rank: Not Ranked
Essential Films:
Memento
The Batman Trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises)
The Prestige
Inception
Interstellar

Biggest Fans:
bootsy (1)
Liveinphoenix (5)
stone37 (11)


34) Robert Altman
336.7 points / 12 votes
[imgsize 380x280]http://www.filmreference.com/images/sjff_02_img0560.jpg[/imgsize]
"The undeniable brilliance of Altman's cinema is most closely tied to a simple point made in each of his greatest works: the tapestry of overlapping lives is richer than overproduced spectacle. Witness Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, or Gosford Park: each film lets characters complicate events by their unique personality traits rather than showcases special-effects technicians and pyrotechnics." - Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, 501 Movie Directors

TSPDT Rank: 45
Essential Films:
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Long Goodbye
Nashville
3 Women
Short Cuts

Biggest Fans:
Liveinphoenix (8)
Harold (13)
Greg (18)
McJagger (18)
Rob (20)


33) Sidney Lumet
340.5 points / 11 votes
[imgsize 400x280]https://olivierpere.files.wordpress.com ... z-vous.jpg[/imgsize]
"One of the 'young guard' of film directors who emerged from the ranks of television and revitalised the American screen in the late 1950s. A fairly prolific film-maker, he is at his best dealing with claustrophobic situations and characters at breaking point, very much in key with his television training.” – Margaret Hinxman, The International Encyclopedia of Film

TSPDT Rank: 98
Essential Films:
12 Angry Men
The Pawnbroker
Dog Day Afternoon
Network
The Verdict

Biggest Fans:
PlasticRam (1)
stone37 (15)

[PlasticRam]

Great to see I had quite a big effect on Forman's and Lumet's rankings

Man on the Moon is my second favorite Forman movie, so would be nice to see it among the essential films, but whatever's fine.

[JimmyJazz]

32) Roman Polanski
353.5 points / 13 votes
[imgsize 400x280]http://media.portable.tv/wp-content/upl ... lanski.jpg[/imgsize]
"Polanski, like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch before him, is a genre filmmaker of the classic sort. Although his contemporaries, such as Volker Schlondorff and Krzysztof Kieslowski, have opted for genres of voice, the moral fable, and the satire, Polanski has been far more classical, preferring to use film noir, horror films, or war films and their traditions of mixing plot and character layers in accord with the particular genre convention." - Ken Dancyger, The Director's Idea: The Path to Great Directing

TSPDT Rank: 40
Essential Films:
Repulsion
Cul-de-sac
Rosemary's Baby
Chinatown
The Tenant

Biggest Fans:
PlasticRam (9)
bonnielaurel (14)
Petri (14)


31) Robert Bresson
382.95 points / 8 votes
[imgsize 280x280]http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/b/r/ ... t-03-g.jpg[/imgsize]
“Bluntly put, to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it's to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago. The late French filmmaker made 13 features over the course of his 40-year career; each is a drama of faith so uncompromising as to border on the absurd. Bresson's actors do not act, they simply are; his favorite effect is the close-up. His movies may be cerebral, but their effect is primarily emotional—or physiological. They naturally induce a state of heightened awareness. Some might call it "grace." – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

TSPDT Rank: 17
Essential Films:
Diary of a Country Priest
A Man Escaped
Pickpocket
Au hasard Balthazar
L'Argent

Biggest Fans:
JimmyJazz (1)
McJagger (2)
Jirin (15)
Harold (17)
Greg (20)


30) Krzysztof Kieslowski
399.6 points / 12 votes
[imgsize 400x280]http://img.blogdecine.com/Kieslowski.jpg[/imgsize]
"Of all European directors of recent decades, Krzysztof Kieslowski is the most obvious legatee of the high seriousness that we associate with Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky. He pushed traditional European art cinema in the face of Hollywood dominance and the burgeoning auteur cinemas from other parts of the world... Dekalog made Kieslowski's name, and provided the material that led to A Short Film About Killing (1987) and A Short Film About Love (1988). In these films Kieslowski began to elaborate a theme of interconnectedness that would be key to his oeuvre. If his narrative reticence and obscure images have generated criticism, they have equally been praised for the thematic ambiguity and density they bring to his work." - Richard Armstrong, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 49
Essential Films:
A Short Film About Killing
A Short Film About Love
The Decalogue
The Double Life of Veronique
The Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, and Red

Biggest Fans:
Michel (5)
Chambord (6)
Henrik (16)
Jirin (17)
McJagger (20)

[JimmyJazz]

29) Carl Theodor Dreyer
403.4 points / 11 votes
[imgsize 300x280]http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/wp-con ... dreyer.jpg[/imgsize]
“The creator of perhaps cinema’s most purely spiritual works, Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer is one of the most influential moving image makers of all time, his arrestingly spare and innovative approach echoed in the films of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, and countless others. After making his mark with such narrative silent films as the provocative Michael (1924) and Master of the House (1925), Dreyer created The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which, though deemed a failure on its release, is now considered, with its mix of stark realism and expressionism (and astonishing, iconic performance by Maria Falconetti), one of the great artistic works of the twentieth century. For the next four decades, Dreyer would continue to make films about people caught in battle between the spirit and the flesh and to experiment technically with the form. Vampyr (1932) is a mesmerizing horror fable full of camera and editing tricks; Day of Wrath (1943) is an intense tale of social repression, made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark; Ordet (1955) is a shattering look at a farming family’s inner religious world; and Gertrud (1964) is a portrait of a fiercely independent woman’s struggle for personal salvation.” – The Criterion Collection

TSPDT Rank: 16
Essential Films:
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Vampyr
Day of Wrath
Ordet
Gertrud

Biggest Fans:
McJagger (3)
JimmyJazz (4)
Chambord (11)
Gillingham (12)
pauldrach (20)


28) Werner Herzog
418.9 points / 11 votes
[imgsize 400x280]http://historyofourworld.files.wordpres ... -jpg1.jpeg[/imgsize]
"Werner Herzog, more than any director of his generation, has through his films embodied German history, character, and cultural richness. While references to verbal and other visual arts would be out of place in treating most film directors, they are key to understanding Herzog. For his techniques he reaches back into the early part of the twentieth century to the Expressionist painters and filmmakers, back to the Romantic painters and writers for the luminance and allegorization of landscape and the human figure." - Rodney Farnsworth, The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia

TSPDT Rank: 50
Essential Films:
Land of Silence and Darkness
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Fitzcarraldo
Lessons of Darkness

Biggest Fans:
Greg (1)
whuntva (7)
Petri (10)
Rob (14)

[JimmyJazz]

Last batch for today, guys. Tomorrow, the Top 25 is unveiled!

Feel free to attempt to predict the results for tomorrow!

27) Federico Fellini
426 points / 11 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/up ... -image.jpg[/imgsize]
“The Fellini oeuvre departs from the neorealist dictum of character determined by historical circumstance to the personalized character steered, for better or worse, by his or her subjectivity. Character “subjectivity” includes questions of spirituality and salvation, and La dolce vita points to the failure of the boom to promise either. 8½ takes up the theme of auteurial self-consciousness which then resurfaces in Roma and Intervista, and has its distaff expression in Giulietta degli spiriti. Fellini also supplied essays on fascist Italy (Amarcord), male/female relations (La città delle donne), and the death of variety showbiz (Ginger e Fred). His career compresses the comparable progress in literature from 19th century realism to the reflexive post-modernity of compatriots Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. Exposing the means of fiction, playwrighting, or filmmaking in Fellini’s case (in contrast to the neorealist posture of delivering an unmediated story with newsreel aesthetics), all these authors uncover the “ploy” of authorship. It’s as if Fellini critiqued realism as an impossible notion by pointing up its fabrication and adding the suppressed element of the fantastic. In his own words, “I make a film in the same manner in which I live a dream…” – Antonia Shanahan, Senses of Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 4
Essential Films:
La Strada
Nights of Cabiria
La Dolce vita
8 1/2
Amarcord

Biggest Fans:
Greg (5)
McJagger (5)
bonnielaurel (8)
BleuPanda (10)


26) Jean-Luc Godard
434.5 points / 9 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://content9.flixster.com/photo/63/2 ... 43_ori.jpg[/imgsize]
"A pioneer of the French new wave, Jean-Luc Godard has had an incalculable effect on modern cinema that refuses to wane. Before directing, Godard was an ethnology student and a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, and his approach to filmmaking reflects his interest in how cinematic form intertwines with social reality. His groundbreaking debut feature, Breathless—his first and last mainstream success—is, of course, essential Godard: its strategy of merging high (Mozart) and low (American crime thrillers) culture has been mimicked by generations of filmmakers. As the sixties progressed, Godard’s output became increasingly radical, both aesthetically (A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, Band of Outsiders) and politically (Masculin féminin, Pierrot le fou), until by 1968 he had forsworn commercial cinema altogether, forming a leftist filmmaking collective (the Dziga Vertov Group) and making such films as Tout va bien. Today Godard remains our greatest lyricist on historical trauma, religion, and the legacy of cinema." - The Criterion Collection

TSPDT Rank: 5
Essential Films:
Breathless
Vivre sa vie
Contempt
Pierrot le fou
Histoire(s) du cinema

Biggest Fans:
Chambord (1)
Michel (2)
JimmyJazz (3)
BleuPanda (8)

[BleuPanda]

I was really expecting those last two to be much higher.

[JimmyJazz]

I was really expecting those last two to be much higher.

Yeah, a lot of major auteurs which on your typical "Best Directors" list would place in, like, the Top 10 or 20 are nowhere to be found in this Top 20 (Renoir, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Fellini, Godard). From my observation, this list has a definite post-1960, or even post-1970 bias, and the vast majority of the Top 25 directors, as you will see, for the most part, made movies that are very visually flashy, narratively straightforward, and oftentimes action-oriented.

...And on that note, here is the Top 25!

25) David Fincher
440.2 points / 13 votes
[imgsize 400x280]http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads ... er2b_f.jpg[/imgsize]
"David Fincher is a devotee of darkness. Scene after scene in his films takes place in cramped, sparsely lit rooms where malignancy seems to hang in the air like ineradicable damp. For the shadows that pervade his films are moral and psychological no less than physical. Using darkness as a metaphor for evil and danger is hardly original—it is the entire basis of film noir, for a start—but Fincher brings to the banal equation a degree of emotional intensity that reinvigorates it. The darkness in his films is organic, the element in which his characters swim." - Philip Kemp, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers

TSPDT Rank: 174
Essential Films:
Seven
Fight Club
Zodiac
The Social Network
Gone Girl

Biggest Fans:
bootsy (2)
Stephan (7)
stone37 (10)
Miguel (17)
Harold (20)


24) Terrence Malick
459.6 points / 11 votes
[imgsize 250x280]http://www.fipresci.org/UNDERCURRENT/is ... malick.jpg[/imgsize]
"Malick is the modern American cinema's great poet-philosopher, whose images, painstakingly perfectionist in their historical accuracy yet imbued with the timelessness of myth, speak of a fascination with - and perhaps, faith in - the transcendent." - Geoff Andrew, The Director's Vision

TSPDT Rank: 51
Essential Films:
Badlands
Days of Heaven
The Thin Red Line
The New World
The Tree of Life

Biggest Fans:
Chambord (5)
pauldrach (5)
Gillingham (6)
McJagger (8)
bootsy (11)
Rob (16)

[JimmyJazz]

23) Lars von Trier
463.5 points / 11 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://www.finalreel.co.uk/wp-content/u ... -Trier.jpg[/imgsize]
"A natural provocateur, Lars Trier added the "von" to his name at the age of 20, less as a homage to Stroheim or Sternberg than as an act of effrontery and mischief; this reportedly deeply neurotic, phobic individual is also a daring exhibitionist. This propensity for pushing his ego to the fore has made von Trier a controversial figure, but also, with Pedro Almodóvar and Emir Kusturica one of the three most acclaimed European filmmakers of his generation... Is he an arch manipulator and a charlatan? Von Trier has certainly been guilty of the first charge, but his probing, deterministic view of man's inhumanity to man has an appropriate moral severity, and his bold, experimental aesthetic impulses are undoubtedly a shot in the arm for the European art film tradition." - Tom Charity, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 84
Essential Films:
Europa
Breaking the Waves
Dancer in the Dark
Dogville
Melancholia

Biggest Fans:
Michel (1)
Petri (9)
Maschine Man (13)
Greg (16)
Gillingham (18)
BleuPanda (19)
Chambord (19)


22) John Ford
463.9 points / 12 votes
[imgsize 350x280]http://images.starpulse.com/Photos/Prev ... d-pb01.jpg[/imgsize]
"Ford developed his craft in the twenties, achieved dramatic force in the thirties, epic sweep in the forties, and symbolic evocation in the fifties. His style has evolved almost miraculously into a double vision of an event in all its vital immediacy and yet also in its ultimate memory image on the horizon of history… Ultimately, Ford’s cinema must be considered a continent full of mountain peaks and valleys. The Horse Soldiers is weakest when the characters are talking abstractly about war, but the march of the little boy soldiers lingers in the mind long after all the dialogues have been forgotten. Tyrone Power may have played very broadly in The Long Gray Line, but who can forget the first materialization of his family at the kitchen table or Maureen O’Hara’s standing in the doorway and watching a son-substitute go off to war. Ford is more than the sum of his great moments, however. A storyteller and poet of images, he made his movies both move and be moving." - Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 9
Essential Films:
Stagecoach
The Grapes of Wrath
My Darling Clementine
The Searchers
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Biggest Fans:
JimmyJazz (2)
stone37 (2)
Harold (7)
bonnielaurel (18)

[JimmyJazz]

21) Luis Buñuel
469.8 points / 14 votes
[imgsize 200x280]http://i500.listal.com/image/964811/500full.jpg[/imgsize]
"Though the Church and bourgeoisie were his prime targets, beggars might be thieves and rapists, blind men paedophiles, virginal cripples harridans, and housewives afternoon whores; all were calmly and coolly examined as if insects under the microscope, with the fascinated, bemused Buñuel never hammering home a moral sermon, but merely revealing, in a strange spirit of sympathy, the fundamental comedy of the human condition. He was, in short, one of cinema's greatest, most unassertive masters." - Geoff Andrew, The Director's Vision

TSPDT Rank: 14
Essential Films:
Un Chien andalou
L'Age d'or
Los Olvidados
Viridiana
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Biggest Fans:
pauldrach (3)
BleuPanda (6)
Harold (8)
McJagger (9)
Rob (9)
Jirin (12)
JimmyJazz (13)
Michel (17)


20) Paul Thomas Anderson
478.9 points / 14 votes
[imgsize 200x280]https://halmasonberg.files.wordpress.co ... gnolia.jpg[/imgsize]
"Like most American directors of his generation, Anderson has obvious roots in the cinema of the 1970s. His first two films in particular show the imprint of Martin Scorsese, in the restless energy of the camera, the crisp pacing, the smart use of popular music and the low-life seedy settings. Similarly, the large casts and overlapping plotlines of Boogie Nights and Magnolia show a clear debt to Robert Altman. But Anderson’s thematic concerns and perspective on his characters are distinctively his. His movies have their share of violence and emotional rawness, but there is something fundamentally warm about them." - Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film

TSPDT Rank: 104
Essential Films:
Boogie Nights
Magnolia
Punch-Drunk Love
There Will Be Blood
The Master

Biggest Fans:
Rob (5)
stone37 (6)
Harold (11)
Gillingham (17)
BleuPanda (18)
Petri (18)

[JimmyJazz]

Two of Tarantino's idols coming up...

19) Howard Hawks
538.3 points / 13 votes
[imgsize 250x280]https://frame2interlace.files.wordpress ... avo_06.jpg[/imgsize]
"He worked in every major genre, and produced classics in each of them. The French auteurist critics put him in the highest pantheon, alongside Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Yet Hawks was the least pretentious of great filmmakers. His style is transparent and unobtrusive; he didn't want the aesthetics to distract from the characters." - Tom Charity (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

TSPDT Rank: 21
Essential Films:
Bringing Up Baby
His Girl Friday
The Big Sleep
Red River
Rio Bravo

Biggest Fans:
Rob (2)
Harold (4)
pauldrach (9)
JimmyJazz (11)
bonnielaurel (13)
Miguel (15)
Stephan (19)


18) Sergio Leone
539 points / 14 votes
[imgsize 300x280]http://www.arte.tv/sites/fr/olivierpere ... erique.jpg[/imgsize]
"A master of widescreen Techniscope composition, he brought depth and movement to his landscapes with elegant crane shots and brazen pans; he also evinced a startling propensity for juxtaposing wide shots with ultra-tight close-ups. Ennio Morricone's eclectic and innovative scores were also integral to the films' impact - flippant and ironic, but with an undertow of nostalgia and regret. Much derided by contemporary US critics for their supposed "violence" (Pauline Kael branded them "fascist"), the Leone Westerns show little love for the land (which is mostly desert scrub) and have no faith in human decency." - Tom Charity, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 39
Essential Films:
A Fistful of Dollars
For a Few Dollars More
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Once Upon a Time in the West
Once Upon a Time in America

Biggest Fans:
Henrik (5)
Stephan (6)
Gillingham (7)
bootsy (10)
Rob (11)

[JimmyJazz]

17) Fritz Lang
545 points / 14 votes
[imgsize 250x280]http://www.williamahearn.com/fritzlang2.jpg[/imgsize]
"Fritz Lang's cinema is the cinema of the nightmare, the fable, and the philosophical dissertation. Lang's apparent weaknesses are the consequences of his virtues... His characters never develop with any psychological precision, and his world lacks the details of verisimilitude that are so important to realistic critics. However, Lang's vision of the world is profoundly expressed by his visual forms." - Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 22
Essential Films:
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
Metropolis
M
Scarlet Street
The Big Heat

Biggest Fans:
Charlie Driggs (4)
Greg (8)
Rob (8)
Petri (11)
Michel (14)
JimmyJazz (17)
McJagger (17)
Maschine Man (19)


16) Francis Ford Coppola
590 points / 14 votes
[imgsize 450x280]http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/upl ... oppola.jpg[/imgsize]
“Coppola restlessly veers between commercial and personal projects, social criticism and a celebration of ritual tradition; as an artist he is as divided a personality as many of his creations. That's why, perhaps, his finest work is ironic and ambivalent: the cross-cutting between baptism and bloody murder in The Godfather, the conflict between professionalism and ethics in The Conversation, the idea that war can be horrific and exciting in Apocalypse Now. Sadly, his recent work is a pale shadow of those audacious, ambitious movies." - Geoff Andrew, The Director's Vision

TSPDT Rank: 8
Essential Films:
The Godfather
The Conversation
The Godfather Part II
Apocalypse Now

Biggest Fans:
Michel (4)
Stephan (5)
Romain (6)
Gillingham (8)
bootsy (12)
Harold (12)
stone37 (14)

[Jirin]

I'm stoked to see Bela Tarr that high. When I didn't see him toward the bottom I thought he might have missed the list entirely. He is not the most accessible of directors.

[JimmyJazz]

I'm stoked to see Bela Tarr that high. When I didn't see him toward the bottom I thought he might have missed the list entirely. He is not the most accessible of directors.

I agree. It is one of the more pleasant surprises of the poll.

[DDD troll account]

Yay for Buñuel so far being the one director with top 20 votes only.

[bonnielaurel]

Yay for Buñuel so far being the one director with top 20 votes only.

Impossible. He was my #58.

[JimmyJazz]

15) Steven Spielberg
629.9 points / 15 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://schmoesknow.com/wp-content/uploa ... lberg1.jpg[/imgsize]
"One of the most famous Hollywood directors, Steven Spielberg has an intuitive sense of the hopes and fears of his audience. This quality and his showmanship have made him one of the greats, in the league of Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock." - Ronald Bergan, Eyewitness Companions: Film

TSPDT Rank: 30
Essential Films:
Jaws
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Raiders of the Lost Ark
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Schindler's List

Biggest Fans:
Liveinphoenix (2)
bootsy (4)
Stephan (4)
Miguel (10)
Romain (11)
PlasticRam(10)
bonnielaurel (15)
Harold (16)


14) Hayao Miyazaki
646.3 points / 10 votes
[imgsize 320x280]http://asianwiki.com/images/e/ef/Hayao_Miyazaki.jpg[/imgsize]
"Over the last three decades, Miyazaki, and his company Studio Ghibli, have been behind some of the greatest masterpieces that animated film have ever seen, strange wonderful pictures that couldn't have come from anywhere or anyone else, and have broken out of love from just the hardcore anime fans to enchant audiences and cinephiles the world over.” – Indiewire

TSPDT Rank: 95
Essential Films:
My Neighbor Totoro
Princess Mononoke
Spirited Away
Howl's Moving Castle
The Wind Rises

Biggest Fans:
PlasticRam (2)
BleuPanda (3)
Henrik (4)
Maschine Man (4)
Rob (4)
pauldrach (6)
Petri (6)
whuntva (8)

[JimmyJazz]

Yay for Buñuel so far being the one director with top 20 votes only.

That was another mistake on my part; just as with PTA Bunuel got 14 votes overall. I made the mistake of counting his Top 20 votes only. I have corrected that now. Also, could somebody tell me if they voted for Miyazaki other than the listed "Biggest Fans"? I wrote down that he has 8 "biggest fans", but I have found only 7.

[whuntva]

Whoa! Did not see Miyazaki making the Top 20! Pleasant surprise. He has never disappointed me.

[JimmyJazz]

13) Billy Wilder
680.5 points / 13 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://cinemagumbo.squarespace.com/stor ... 5822128544[/imgsize]
“Bridging the transition between the studio system and the rise of independent producer-directors, and still active in the ‘New Hollywood’ era, Billy Wilder was a key player in the American cinema throughout the postwar period. A ’30s screenwriter who became a contract director in the ’40s, by 1950 Wilder had come to be regarded as a consummate studio auteur. Producing from the mid-1950s, he and his co-screenwriters were renowned in front office and fan magazine for making money, teasing audience sensibilities, and pleasing the critics. If the early-1960s saw a critical downturn, by the mid-1970s Wilder’s reputation led to accolades and awards. … He was one of the last links we had with classical Hollywood, and we owe him one of the most articulate, enjoyable and influential oeuvres in the history of the American cinema.” – Richard Armstrong, Senses of Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 18
Essential Films:
Double Indemnity
Sunset Blvd.
Ace in the Hole
Some Like it Hot
The Apartment

Biggest Fans:
Stephan (1)
Miguel (2)
bonnielaurel (3)
stone37 (3)
Michel (8)
Henrik (11)
Greg (12)
pauldrach (14)
Harold (15)
Petri (16)
BleuPanda (17)


12) Woody Allen
694.2 points / 17 votes
[imgsize 250x280]http://fishandbicylces.files.wordpress. ... /woody.jpg[/imgsize]
"Woody Allen is one of the most distinctive American directors of the post-war period. Having released almost a film a year for 35 years, and articulated in literate terms the ethical misgivings of his generation, Allen has staged the vicissitudes of contemporary culture with more humour and pity than any other American director." - Richard Armstrong, The Rough Guide to Film

TSPDT Rank: 31
Essential Films:
Annie Hall
Manhattan
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Hannah and Her Sisters
Crimes and Misdemeanors

Biggest Fans:
bonnielaurel (2)
Romain (2)
Henrik (6)
Rob (6)
Miguel (8)
Jirin (14)
BleuPanda (15)
Petri (15)


11) Andrei Tarkovsky
704 points / 12 votes
[imgsize 240x280]http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_product ... 1337461025[/imgsize]
“Andrei Tarkovsky is almost certainly the most famous Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein. His visionary approach to cinematic time and space, as well as his commitment to cinema as poetry, mark his oeuvre as one of the defining moments in the development of the modern art film. Although he never tackled politics directly, the metaphysical preoccupations of films such as Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979) provoked ongoing hostility from the Soviet authorities. Like many other artists in the Soviet Union, his career was marked by constant struggles with the authorities to realise his vision. Although this meant he completed only seven features in his 27 years as a director, each one is strikingly uncompromising in its thematic ambition and formal boldness. Whether or not he would have fared better under the capitalist film industry in the West is open to debate - Bresson and Dreyer, for example, both suffered frequent frustrations in creating their formally radical investigations into human spirituality. … Even at its bleakest, Tarkovsky's universe is suffused with faith and the idea of transcendence.” – Maximilian Le Cain, Senses of Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 13
Essential Films:
Andrei Rublev
Solaris
Mirror
Stalker
The Sacrifice

Biggest Fans:
Jirin (1)
McJagger (1)
Chambord (2)
Gillingham (2)
Greg (2)
pauldrach (2)
BleuPanda (13)
JimmyJazz (20)

[JimmyJazz]

Now, gentlemen, we officially have arrived at the Top Ten!!!

[JimmyJazz]

10) Charles Chaplin
747 points / 15 votes
[imgsize 230x280]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... haplin.jpg[/imgsize]
"The sophisticated intelligence and skills he brought to slapstick comedy forced intellectuals to recognise that art could reside in a wholly popular entertainment, and not just in those self-consciously 'artistic' products with which the cinema first tried to court respectability. In the 1910s and 20s Chaplin's Tramp, combating a hostile and unrewarding world with cheek and gallantry, afforded a talisman and champion to the underprivileged millions who were the cinema's first mass audience." - David Robinson, The Oxford History of World Cinema

TSPDT Rank: 15
Essential Films:
The Gold Rush
City Lights
Modern Times
The Great Dictator
Monsieur Verdoux

Biggest Fans:
Henrik (2)
Miguel (3)
Petri (3)
bonnielaurel (4)
Michel (9)
BleuPanda (11)
Charlie Driggs (11)
Greg (15)
Stephan (15)

[Gillingham]

Don't have much opportunity to follow the unveiling of the top 100, but it started of great with Clouzot en Roeg, two directors I was afraid of that they wouldn't make the top 100.

I also expected Fellini and Godard higher. Guess we are in for some surprises.

Didn't expect Miyazaki so high, personally not a fan of his works.
The position of Tarr is indeed a pleasant surprise.

Looking forward to the top 10.

[JimmyJazz]

9) Orson Welles
806.4 points / 18 votes
[imgsize 300x280]http://sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/up ... ge0072.jpg[/imgsize]
"It is almost tragically ironic that George Orson Welles, without doubt one of the greatest filmmakers ever, was forced to work for most of his career under the most adverse of conditions. Such were his genius and ambition that his films, years ahead of their time, still astonish by their inventiveness, stylistic virtuosity and freshness; while the widely held view that he never fulfilled his early promise fails to take account of the thematic and moral consistency of his work, not to say its restless experimentalism." - Geoff Andrew, The Film Handbook

TSPDT Rank: 2
Essential Films:
Citizen Kane
The Magnificent Ambersons
Touch of Evil
Chimes at Midnight
F for Fake

Biggest Fans:
whuntva (4)
Harold (6)
Jirin (7)
Chambord (8)
JimmyJazz (8)
Greg (9)
Liveinphoenix (9)
Stephan (11)
Michel (15)
stone37 (16)
pauldrach (17)

[PlasticRam]

I think I had Miyazaki as my #2. Edit: Added, thanks.

[JimmyJazz]

8) Quentin Tarantino
856.5 points / 20 votes
[imgsize 500x280]http://imageserver.moviepilot.com/image ... height=311[/imgsize]
"Bound within an allusive, postmodern sensibility, Tarantino's work conflates 'high' and 'low' cine-cultural forms, referencing an array of seemingly incompatible sources such as Jean-Luc Godard, 1970s blaxploitation and Hong Kong action cinema." - Neil Jackson, Contemporary North American Film Directors

TSPDT Rank: 73
Essential Films:
Reservoir Dogs
Pulp Fiction
Jackie Brown
Inglorious Basterds
Django Unchained

Biggest Fans:
PlasticRam (4)
Romain (4)
Maschine Man (5)
bootsy (6)
Henrik (10)
Liveinphoenix (10)
Miguel (13)
pauldrach (15)
Gillingham (19)
Michel (20)