The 100 Best Directors of All Time

By Martin Keady · October 6, 2023

What makes a great film director? Is it, as Orson Welles suggested, just one really great film, or is it a body of work? Well, all 100 directors on this list, which stretches from the (silent) start of cinema in the late 19th century to the present day, each made at least one masterpiece and most of them made several more, with the very greatest among them making many masterpieces. And in making those masterpieces, they dramatically increased film’s ability to tell stories, changing the style, subject matter and even the sheer impact of cinema.

Here are the 100 Best Directors of all time, in ascending order, starting from 1 to 100.

1. Jean Renoir (1894–1979)

The greatest film director ever, in my opinion and that of many film writers, critics and directors, is France’s Jean Renoir. Emerging from the gigantic shadow cast by his father, the great Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean struck out on his own in the then new medium of film. His visionary eye, his mastery of story and above all his immense humanity are evident in almost all his films, especially his 1930s masterpieces, but nowhere more so than in La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion) (1937) and La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939), which respectively looked back to the horror and folly of WWI and forward to the even greater tragedy of WW2. They remain the finest pair of films ever made by a single film-maker.

Best films: La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion) (1937); La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939).

Read More: The Top 10 Renoir Movies

2. Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022)

The most terrible enfant terrible in the history of cinema eventually became an elder statesman of sorts, but he always retained his youthful, even revolutionary, vigor. He certainly revolutionized cinema with À bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960), his debut and the finest debut in film history. With its ultra-cool anti-hero, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, its jump-cuts (or abrupt edits) and above all its sense of having escaped from the studio into the streets, it ushered in the French new wave or nouvelle vague of film-making, the lessons of which were fully absorbed by the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Godard’s best films came in his first decade, but he continued to make films until just before his death.

Best films: À bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960); Le Mepris (Contempt) (1963) Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) (1964).

Read More: Breathless: Cocky on the Cusp

3. Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Bergman virtually invented “Scandi-Noir” 40 years before the term was coined, but he also made Scandi-Comedy, Scandi-History and Scandi-Tragedy throughout his long and career. His work was the embodiment of Nordic froideur, but behind the apparently cool exterior pumped the hottest of blood. He broke through internationally in the mid-1950s with Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) (1955), a romantic comedy, and swiftly followed it with a succession of very different masterpieces, including: Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) (1957); Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) (also 1957); and Through A Glass Darkly (1961). He became the inspiration, if not idol, of many other film-makers, justifying that status with further austere but wondrous films from Persona (1966) through to his late, semi-autobiographical family saga, Fanny and Alexander (1982).

Best films: Sommarnattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) (1955); Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) (1957); Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) (also 1957).

4. Federico Fellini (1920-1993)

Like all great artists, the greatest film directors inevitably earn their “-esque,” the suffix invariably added to an artist’s name to encapsulate their worldview. Like “Bergman-esque”, “Fellini-esque” became ubiquitous in the 1960s and 1970s to evoke films (or even real-life incidents) that somehow combined the magical and the mundane, the realistic and the surrealistic. Emerging from the Italian neorealism that immediately followed WW2, Fellini embarked on one of the longest imperial phases of any film-maker, stretching from I Vitelloni (The Layabouts) (1953) through La Strada (The Road) (1954) and La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) (1960) to Otto e mezzo (8 ½) (1963), which, sixty years on, remains probably the greatest film ever made about film-making itself.

Best films: I Vitelloni (The Layabouts) (1953); La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) (1960); Otto e mezzo (8 ½) (1963).

5. Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

Kubrick is the greatest film director in the English language. And language was always vital to Kubrick because almost all his films were based on books, making him the finest cinematic adaptor of literature; he famously said that he could not write an original screenplay, because doing so would deny him the surprise of a great ending to a story that he had not anticipated. He began in America as virtually the first independent film-maker, with low-budget but high-quality films such as The Killing (1956), before graduating to Hollywood when he took over Spartacus (1960). However, it was in self-imposed exile in Britain that he made his greatest films, especially “The Insanity Trilogy” of Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb) (1964), 2001 (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), in which he unblinkingly showed man’s insanity to man.

Best films: Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb) (1964); 2001 (1968); A Clockwork Orange (1971).

6. Robert Bresson (1901-1999)

Godard said of Bresson: “He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music”. Coming between Renoir and Godard himself, Bresson was the third great genius of 20th century French cinema. He drew upon his own experience of being a POW in WW2 to make Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped) (1956) and his hawk-like observation of urban life to make Pickpocket (1959), which were minimalist masterpieces. And he completed an unrelated trilogy of great films with Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), a film about a donkey that is, paradoxically, one of the most humane films ever made.

Best films: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped) (1956); Pickpocket (1959); Au Hasard Balthazar (1966).

7. Billy Wilder (1906-2002)

Billy Wilder was the greatest filmmaker in English for whom English was not his first language. Having fled the Nazification of his native Austria, he was initially just another émigré Jewish film-maker in Hollywood. Gradually, under the tutelage of Ernst Lubitsch, another Mitteleuropean, he became a successful screenwriter before becoming an even more successful writer-director. His finest films came in two distinct periods with two different co-writers: Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), when he worked mainly with Charles Brackett; and nearly a decade later with I.A.L. Diamond on the greatest comic double-bill ever, Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960).

Best films: Sunset Boulevard (1950); Some Like It Hot (1959); The Apartment (1960).

8. Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

Perhaps more than any other director, Hitchcock’s career spanned the history of film: from the silent era, with his best silent film being The Lodger (1927), about a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer; through the first decade of the “talkies,” during which his finest films were The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938); and culminating in his near-miraculous run of Hollywood films in the 1950s, a decade that more than any other artist in any other medium he virtually made his own.

Best films: Vertigo (1958); North by Northwest (1959); Psycho (1960).

9. Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)

Kurosawa was the filmmaker who brought Japanese film, and by extension much other non-English language film-making, to the attention of the Western (and largely English-speaking) world. His breakthrough was Rashomon (1950), a film whose title became a by-word for the uncertainty it examined, and he followed it up with a succession of masterpieces, most of which were remade in English, including Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), whose samurai stories provided an alternative action template to the American Western.

Best films: Rashomon (1950); Seven Samurai (1954); Yojimbo (1961).

10. Orson Welles (1915-1985)

Having already conquered theatre and radio, “Awesome Orson” duly conquered cinema with his first film, Citizen Kane (1941), which with its deep-focus photography (by cinematographer Gregg Toland) and narrative complexity (courtesy of original screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles himself) finally allowed film, especially sound film, to rank alongside literature and theatre as a serious artistic medium. From that peak, aged just 26, it was almost inevitably all downhill for Welles, at least in Hollywood, but he continued to make magnificent films, including probably the last great noir Touch of Evil (1958) and his superb film about Falstaff, another overweight genius, Chimes at Midnight (1966).

Best films: Citizen Kane (1941); The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); Touch of Evil (1958).

11. Chantal Akerman (1950-2015)

Chantal Akerman gained posthumous global fame in 2022 when she became the first woman to top the most famous poll of greatest films, Sight and Sound magazine’s once-a-decade assessment, with Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), her intimate epic about an apparently ordinary housewife who turns out to be a sex worker. It represented a sea change in attitudes towards female film directors and brought attention to her other films, notably Je Tu Il Elle (I You He She) (1974) and News From Home (1977). But it is Jeanne Dielman, with its remarkably matter-of-fact presentation of sexual and even criminal acts that is her absolute masterpiece.

Best films: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

12. Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963)

Ozu was arguably film’s greatest chronicler of family. He certainly made the greatest ever film about family, Tokyo Story (1953), a seemingly small film about an elderly couple visiting their children (and daughter-in-law) in Japan’s capital that is actually universal in its depiction of the triumphs and disappointments of family life. Tokyo Story was the centerpiece of the three late films with which Ozu made his name internationally after a long apprenticeship that had begun in silent films, being preceded by Late Spring (1949) and followed by An Autumn Afternoon (1962), made just before his death. All three are beautifully simple and simply beautiful examinations of apparently ordinary family life, which in reality is the most extraordinary drama that most of us ever participate in.

Best films: Late Spring (1949); Tokyo Story (1953); An Autumn Afternoon (1962).

13. Martin Scorsese (born 1942)

Martin Scorsese is probably the greatest living film director, certainly in English-language cinema, having had a legendary career that has seen him eventually outstrip even the achievements of his greatest contemporary in 1970s cinema, Francis Ford Coppola. Scorsese’s breakthrough was Mean Streets (1973), a low-level, even lowlife depiction of petty Mafiosi that directly contrasted with Coppola’s epic The Godfather films. He built on it with two more masterpieces about tortured masculinity, Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). Perhaps most impressively, he has enjoyed a spectacular late phase, encompassing such fine films as The Aviator (2004), a Howard Hughes biopic, and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which showed how adventure capitalists can be the biggest gangsters of all.

Best films: Mean Streets (1973); Taxi Driver (1976); Raging Bull (1980).

14. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968)

Like Hitchcock, Dreyer was one of the few great Silent Era filmmakers to survive film’s transition to sound; indeed, he not only survived but thrived in the age of talk. It was actually a year after the coming of sound, with The Jazz Singer (1927), that he made his greatest film, the silent La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) (1928). Then, employing an austere but often expressionistic style, he made several sound masterpieces, including: Vampyr (1932), probably the most realistic (and therefore most terrifying) vampire film; Ordet (The Word) (1955), a profound examination of faith (or the lack of it); and Gertrud (1964), in which he took his slow, precise film-making methodology to its logical conclusion, with one take lasting over 10 minutes.

Best films: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) (1928); Vampyr (1932); Ordet (The Word), 1955.

15. Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939)

Coppola may not have enjoyed the longevity of Scorsese but perhaps he didn’t need to after his incredible 70s, when he was the greatest figure in the Second Great Age of Hollywood. In that decade, he wrote and directed The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (also 1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), co-wrote Patton (1970) and wrote Jack Clayton’s truly great The Great Gatsby (1974), which is not only the definitive film version of America’s greatest novel but arguably the finest screen adaptation of any great novel.

Best films: The Godfather (1972); The Godfather Part II (1974); Apocalypse Now (1979).

16. Howard Hawks (1896-1977)

Howard Hawks virtually was Hollywood at its zenith in the 1930s and 1940s, mastering many genres with his trademark wit, energy and panache. His first great film was the original Scarface (1932), which was not just one of the first gangster pictures but one of the first great talkies. He then found his favorite genre, the screwball comedy, which employed machine-gun dialogue rather than machine-gunfire to celebrate the newly empowered women of the post-WWI period, particularly in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). He then conquered the newly emerging film noir, with To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), before his final great film, Rio Bravo (1959), showed he could also master the quintessential American genre, the Western.

Best films: Bringing Up Baby (1938); His Girl Friday (1940); The Big Sleep (1946).

17. Buster Keaton (1895-1966)

Old Stoneface, who retained his stoical expression even as houses crashed down around him, was certainly the most unique and arguably the greatest of the great silent-era clowns, constructing a whole and wholly bewildered worldview in his finest films, which included: The General (1926), a US Civil War-set comedy in which he steals a succession of trains to get back to his beloved; and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), in which he plays the captain of a steam paddle-boat trying to resist the onslaught of newer, faster, non-steam-driven boats.

Best films: The General (1926); Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).

18. Michael Powell (1905-1990)

Along with the Hungarian émigré screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, Powell formed probably the greatest director-writer partnership in film history. WW2 was the making of them, as they summoned a quintessentially English (i.e. quiet but determined) fighting spirit on screen that was the visual embodiment of the Battle of Britain. In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Powell showed how the origins of WW2 lay in WWI; Black Narcissus (1947) is the film equivalent of Pet Sounds, namely the medium’s greatest ever studio creation, in which the Himalayas is somehow recreated in London; and The Red Shoes (1948), was a dance film that itself danced, especially in its hallucinogenic central sequence, which seemed to employ every film-making technique (rapid cutting, split screen etc.) simultaneously.

Best films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); Black Narcissus (1947); The Red Shoes (1948).

19. David Lean (1908-1991)

Spielberg before Spielberg, Lean was a director of truly epic films who left an indelible impression on the young Steven S., who still says that Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is the film he has watched the most. However, whereas Spielberg largely created epic films about sharks, aliens and dinosaurs, Lean depicted actual epic historical events, such as the Asian theatre of WW2 in The Bridge Over The River Kwai (1962) or the Russian revolution in Doctor Zhivago (1965). No one ever created bigger visions for the big screen than David Lean.

Best films: The Bridge Over The River Kwai (1957); Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

20. Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986)

In a tragically brief career (he died aged only 54), Andrei Tarkovsky made only seven features but almost all of them are masterpieces. His own personal magnificent seven began with Ivan’s Childhood (1962), one of the finest films about childhood (especially one ravaged by war) and ended with The Sacrifice (1986), an updating of the Abraham story (Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice his only child) to the nuclear age. In between, he made five other films, notably his “Memory” trilogy of Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979) and Nostalghia (1983), in which he created a cinema that was simultaneously as precise and abstract as memory itself.

Best films: Ivan’s Childhood (1962); Stalker (1979).

21. Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)

Buñuel began his long and glorious career with probably the greatest short film ever made, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929), whose eye-slicing sequence is the deepest and most influential cut in film history. Driven from Spain by the Fascist victory in the civil war, he settled in Mexico, where he produced surrealist masterpieces including El ángel exterminador) (The Exterminating Angel) (1962), in which guests’ inability to leave a dinner party becomes a metaphor for bourgeois intransigence. He returned to Europe (if not Spain) to make a trilogy of late, great films: Belle de Jour (Beauty of the Day) (1967), in which Catherine Deneuve played a prostitute who sees her clients while her husband is at work; Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) (1972), another surrealistic dinner-party film; and, finally, Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire) (1977), in which the unreliability of memory, and by extension film, is demonstrated by an old man reminiscing about a young girl played by two actresses who he cannot distinguish between.

Best films: Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929); Belle de Jour (Beauty of the Day) (1967).

22. Robert Altman (1925-2006)

Appropriately, Altman is the great director of “alt” (or “alternative”) American cinema. In the 1970s, he made several seemingly loose, shambling, not-quite-epics about US medics in the Korean War (MASH, 1970), hustlers and whorehouse-owners in the Wild West (McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)) and the country and western music scene on the eve of America’s bicentennial celebrations (Nashville (1975)). After falling out of favor with Hollywood in the 1980s, he enjoyed a triumphant second act with late-period masterpieces including The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). His trademarks included overlapping dialogue, in which at least two conversations took place on screen simultaneously, just as real conversations do in real life.

Best films: McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971); Nashville (1975).

23. Woody Allen (born 1935)

Over the last 30 years, Woody Allen has gone from being regarded as one of the greatest living film directors to becoming one of the most controversial living film directors, after the allegations of child abuse against him by Mia Farrow, his former partner (and muse), which were eventually dismissed in court. That controversy should not detract from his film-making genius, as he progressed from “early funny” films, such as Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973), to the mature (but thankfully not too mature) masterpieces of the late 1970s, Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). And he has continued to make brilliant films, with the last one (to date, at least) being Midnight In Paris (2011).

Best films: Annie Hall (1977); Manhattan (1979).

24. John Ford (1894-1973)

If his namesake Henry was the King of Cars, John Ford was the King of Westerns, with films in that genre making up the bulk of the nearly 150 films (including many silent ones) that he made. Indeed, Ford did much to create the mythology of the Western, not least by casting John Wayne, who became the face (and often-imitated voice) of the genre. Although Ford made fine films in other genres, including The Grapes of Wrath (1940), it is his Westerns for which he will be remembered, and the best of them, particularly The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance (1962), are among the very greatest in the genre.

Best films: The Searchers (1956); The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance (1962).

25. Agnès Varda (1928-2019)

Like Chantal Akerman, a rival for the title of best female film director ever, Agnès Varda was a Belgian-born French woman. Their origins, along with their gender, seemed to make both women perpetual outsiders, even when Varda became part of the French new wave (nouvelle vague) with films such as Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), about a woman awaiting a possibly terminal medical diagnosis. She enjoyed a late-career renaissance, beginning with Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) (2000), a documentary about the impoverished people who collect leftover crops, and culminating in Varda by Agnes (2019), in which she rewatched many of her films and reflected on their production and reception.

Best films: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962).

26. Charlie Chaplin (1899-1977)

As The Tramp, Chaplin became the first world-famous film star, whose bowler hat, twirling cane and mustache were instantly recognizable almost everywhere on Earth. However, Chaplin was also a great director. He made relatively few features (only 11 between 1921 and 1967), but among them are not only some of the greatest silent films, such as The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931), but some of the greatest sound films, including Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940), his Hitler-baiting satire.

Best films: The Gold Rush (1925); City Lights (1931); Modern Times (1936).

27. Francois Truffaut (1932-1984)

Alongside Godard, Truffaut was the other great and ground-breaking film-maker of the French nouvelle vague (new wave). Indeed, Truffaut got the jump (if not the jump-cut) on Godard by making the first great film of the movement, Les Quatres Cent Coups (The 400 Blows) (1959), a beautiful, semi-autobiographical story about a troubled young boy’s upbringing. He followed it up with Jules et Jim (1962), the greatest cinematic ménage à trois, and Fahrenheit 451 (1966), one of the finest “dy-sci-fi” (dystopian science fiction) films. After the nouvelle vague transformed global film-making, especially the New Hollywood film-making of the 1970s, Truffaut made Day for Night (1973), one of the finest films about film-making, and before his tragically early death at 52 he made a late masterpiece in Le Dernier Métro (The Last Metro) (1980), about life in Paris during the Nazi occupation.

Best films: Les Quatres Cent Coups (The 400 Blows) (1959); Jules et Jim (1962).

28. Satyajit Ray (1921-1992)

India may have the world’s largest film industry in Bollywood, but its films have rarely traveled well outside India and the global “Indiaspora”, with the exception of those by its greatest director, Satyajit Ray. And Ray was not just a great Indian director but one of the first great indie (or independent) directors. He virtually did everything (writing and scoring, in addition to directing) on his breakthrough film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) (1955), which showed India’s road to independence through the eyes of Apu, a poor boy, and on the other films that comprised “The Apu Trilogy”: Aparajito (1956); and The World of Apu (1959). “Apu” may be more famous now for being the name of the Indian shopkeeper in The Simpsons, but Ray’s original Apu introduced India and its impoverished millions to the world. His later films included The Big City (1963), a classic coming-to-the-city film of the kind so common in the Silent Era, but it is the Apu Trilogy that is his enduring legacy.

Best films: The Apu Trilogy (1955-59).

29. Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956)

Kenji Mizoguchi is the least well-known of the three masters of mid-20th century Japanese cinema (the other two being Kurosawa and Ozu), but he was the first and for many (especially in Japan itself) the greatest of the three. Like so many of the greatest directors, he began in the Silent Era but excelled with the coming of sound. His first great film is arguably the first great Japanese film, Zangiku Monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums) (1939), the story of a 19th-century male actor struggling to master female roles (in a time and place when women were banned from acting). After WW2, he made his greatest film, Ugetsu Monogatari (Rain-Moon Tales) (1953), which combined beautifully observed period drama with terrifying ghost stories, and Sanshō Dayū (Sansho the Bailiff) (1954), another period drama that is almost a Japanese The Prince and The Pauper in its tale of aristocratic children sold into servitude.

Best films: Ugetsu Monogatari (Rain-Moon Tales) (1953); Sanshō Dayū (Sansho the Bailiff) (1954).

30. Rainer Maria Fassbinder (1945-1982)

Of all the great directors of the late 20th century, the one who has the most to say to the increasingly gender-fluid and indeed identity-fluid 21st century is Fassbinder, the great film-maker of the “other”, the “other” being those previously dismissed by the Nazis and many others as degenerates: homosexuals; bisexuals; transexuals; and everything in between (and beyond). In many ways, Fassbinder did in film and TV in the 1970s what Bowie and Lou Reed did in pop and rock music, namely questioning every supposed norm or permanent state, especially in the sexual realm. In his best films, such as Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1974), about the love affair between an elderly German woman and a young male Moroccan migrant, or Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), which was originally released on TV, he showed not just two worlds colliding but multiple worlds colliding: global north and global south; Germany’s past and present; and, most importantly, all the possible sexual and social personae that any individual or group of individuals could possess.

Best films: Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1974); Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).

31. D.W. Griffith (1875-1948)

Like Woody Allen, D.W. Griffith is a great filmmaker who has become a virtual director non grata, only with far more justification; indeed, he is almost certainly the most controversial entry on this list. That is because his most influential film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), a partly fictionalized history of America, is undeniably racist in its depiction of African Americans and its lauding of the Ku Klux Klan. However, in pioneering so many filmmaking techniques that soon became standard, including close-ups and fadeouts, it is also an undeniably historically important film. Thus, Griffith is important to the history of film despite his obvious and unpalatable faults.

Best film: The Birth of a Nation (1915).

32. Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)

Master of montage (editing that condenses time and space), Eisenstein was inspired by D.W. Griffith and applied Griffith’s epic sweep and scope to the history of Russia, which unfolded before him in the wake of the Russian Revolution. His great silent films Strike and Battleship Potemkin (both 1925) documented the events leading to the revolution, with the latter featuring the most famous sequence in film history, the Odessa Steps sequence, in which a massacre of workers by soldiers sets a baby’s pram rolling slowly down the titular steps. He reached further back into Russian history with his sound films, Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (Part I: 1944; Part II: released posthumously in 1958), with the former featuring an amazing battle on ice that Ridley Scott has paid homage to (or just plain imitated) in his forthcoming Napoleon.

Best films: Battleship Potemkin (1925); Alexander Nevsky (1938).

33. Jean Vigo (1905-1934)

Vigo’s is the most tragically unfulfilled career of any great director. That was not because of box-office failure or critical backlash but simply because of his early death, before he was 30, from tuberculosis. However, although he made only four films, three of them short (and even the feature was less than 90 minutes long), his canon is small but perfectly formed. À propos de Nice (1930) was an elegant silent documentary about ordinary life in the titular French city; La Natation par Jean Taris, champion de France (Jean Taris, Swimming Champion) (1931), was another stunning documentary short that was one of the first films to use freeze-frames; Zéro de conduit (Zero for Conduct) (1933), based on his own horrific experience of boarding school, was a 40-minute featurette that is one of the greatest short films ever; and L’Atalante (1934), his only feature, is a truly dream-like depiction of life aboard a barge for a young couple and their two crewmates.

Best films: Zéro de conduit (Zero for Conduct) (1933); L’Atalante (1934).

34. Fritz Lang (1890-1976)

Arguably no director made the transition from silence to sound, the greatest transformation in film history, better than Lang. He made one of the last great silent films, and arguably the most influential silent film ever, in Metropolis (1927), one of the first great sci-fi films that predicted the hopelessly divided (between rich and poor) future we now live in. Then he made one of the first great sound films, M (1931), about a child killer who is pursued by both the police and other criminals, which anticipated so much of the crime cinema, including film noir, that followed it. Like so many Jewish European directors, Lang eventually fled to Hollywood, where his output was prodigious but less ground-breaking, with the glorious exception of his US debut, Fury (1936), in which Spencer Tracy plays an innocent man wrongly pursued by a lynch mob, subtly mirroring the Nazi lynch-mobs pursuing Jews in Europe.

Best films: Metropolis (1927); M (1931).

35. Luchino Visconti (1906-1976)

An actual aristocrat (he was Count of Lonate Pozzolo), Visconti was also a cinematic aristocrat, a director who drew on his knowledge of wealthy families and their decline to create the greatest period film ever made, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963), which beautifully but tragically documented the life of a Sicilian aristocrat during Italy’s 19th-century reunification. Put simply, it was the first period drama to show the piss-pots behind all the black tie. Visconti made another masterpiece about another wealthy but dying man, Morte a Venezia (Death In Venice) (1971). However, he was not restricted to “aristo-pics”, having begun his career with one of the finest non-US noirs, Ossessione (Obsession) (1943), and won fame with Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) (1960), showing how migrants from rural southern Italy often struggled to adapt in the more industrialized north.

Best films: Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) (1960); Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963).

36. Frank Capra (1897-1991)

In one way, Capra was the first real film director, in that he was the first director to have his name above the title of a film on its poster, establishing the singular importance of the director in film-making. That was a testament to his directorial genius, which was evident throughout his entire career but best crystallized in his three finest films: It Happened One Night (1934), one of the first great rom-coms and road movies; Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939), the story of a new Senator fighting a corrupt and inert political class; and, above all, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which was a flop upon release but has become the cinematic equivalent of Christmas.

Best films: It Happened One Night (1934); It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

37. Sidney Lumet (1924-1911)

Lumet may be the most underrated great director, as his undemonstrative personality and unfussy style always served his subject matter rather than self-promotion. Nevertheless, he enjoys a unique position in American film history as the only major director to make classic films in both the studio system and the New (and more independent-minded) Hollywood of the 1970s. His debut was 12 Angry Men (1957), a drama about a jury deciding a teenager’s fate, which is the greatest single-location film ever made. Then, 15 years later, he became part of the “Movie Brat” generation, even though he was much older than his supposed peers, with a trio of still-stunning police, crime and TV news dramas: Serpico (1973); Dog Day Afternoon (1975); and Network (1976).

Best films: 12 Angry Men (1957); Dog Day Afternoon (1975); Network (1976).

38. Steven Spielberg (born 1946)

No list of the 100 best film directors could be complete without the most commercially successful film director ever. Along with George Lucas (who was a great mythmaker but not a great director), Spielberg invented the blockbuster with JAWS (1975), a marine equivalent of his killer-truck debut, Duel (1971). He then brought space down to earth with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982), before brilliantly updating the adventure serials of cinema’s past with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In 1993, he not only began another blockbuster series with Jurassic Park but, far more importantly, made the David Lean-type epic he had always dreamt of making with Schindler’s List, a superb film about the Holocaust, which he doubled down on with Saving Private Ryan (1998), his unsparing (in every sense) account of the D-Day landings and their aftermath.

Best films: JAWS (1975); Schindler’s List (1993); Saving Private Ryan (1998).

39. Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947)

Like so many masters, Lubitsch was eventually outstripped by his apprentice, Billy Wilder, who he helped when Wilder first arrived in Hollywood. Indeed, in many ways Lubitsch was Wilder before Wilder, with his wonderfully urbane comedies making America and the world both laugh and think. He had a long career, encompassing both the silent and the sound eras, but his best work came at the end, with an unrelated trilogy of 1940s comic masterpieces: The Shop Around the Corner (1940), in which two workers at the same shop fall in love through their anonymous letters to each other; To Be or Not to Be (1942), in which a Polish acting company use their mastery of disguise to escape the Nazis; and Heaven Can Wait (1943), in which a dissolute playboy attempts to gain admission to hell.

Best films: The Shop Around The Corner (1940); To Be or Not to Be (1942); Heaven Can Wait (1943).

40. Vittorio De Sica (1901-1974)

For much of the second half of the 20th century, Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves) (1948), about an impoverished father and his young son desperately trying to retrieve a bicycle after it is stolen so that the father can continue to put up posters (and thereby feed them), was ranked alongside Renoir’s La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939) as the greatest film ever made, which was a testament to its epic simplicity and simply epic quality. However, whereas La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) has retained its critical standing, The Bicycle Thieves seems to have slipped in most critics’ eyes. Like the film’s subject matter, that is an injustice, as The Bicycle Thieves remains a masterpiece that shows how the smallest catalyst can generate a great film. De Sica made other great films, including Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (1946) and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) (1970), his late classic about a Jewish-Italian family, but it is The Bicycle Thieves that steals any viewer’s heart.

Best films: Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves) (1948).

41. Claire Denis (born 1946)

Like some other directors on this list, such as Welles and Akerman, Denis’s reputation largely rests on one film, but Beau Travail (Good Work) (1999) is such a great film that it alone merits her inclusion. A loose updating and relocating of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1888) to Djibouti in east Africa and the French Foreign Legionnaires stationed there, Beau Travail is one of the great films about men, especially military men, with a female director sensually capturing the delights and degradations that their bodies experience in the desert. Denis’s other best films are Trouble Every Day (2001), an erotic horror, and Stars at Noon (2022), a romantic thriller, but Beau Travail, which translates (ironically) into English as Good Work, is by far her best work.

Best films: Beau Travail (1999).

42. Nicholas Ray (1911-1979)

Godard declared that “Cinema is Nicholas Ray” and if any post-war director was deserving of such high (if not hyperbolic) praise it was Ray, who captured some of the best performances of stars as disparate as Humphrey Bogart and James Dean. His debut was the film noir on the run, They Live By Night (1948), the second greatest RKO picture after Citizen Kane (1941), and he built on it spectacularly with In A Lonely Place (1950), a great screenwriter noir; Johnny Guitar (1954), a proto-feminist Western; and, most famously, Rebel Without A Cause (1955), the finest James Dean film, which was released a month after Dean’s death in a car crash and virtually invented the teenager.

Best films: In A Lonely Place (1950); Rebel Without A Cause (1955).

43. Abel Gance (1889-1981)

Gance outlived the Silent Era but his career, or at least his capacity to make great films, did not. His three best films were all silent and some part of him must have remained in the Silent Era as he sought to remake several of his silent films with sound. His trio of silent classics was: J’accuse (1919), made after WWI and using actual wartime footage to tell a love story with war as its backdrop; La Roue (The Wheel) (1923), another tragedy in which a man falls in love with his adopted daughter; and, above all, Napoleon (1927), the story of France’s greatest general and worst dictator, which brilliantly used all the techniques of silent cinema, including split-screen and superimposition, so many of which all but disappeared with the coming of sound that same year.

Best films: Napoleon (1927).

44. Spike Lee (born 1947)

Spike Lee is not only the most successful African-American film director ever but one of the greatest American directors of the late 20th century and early 21st century. When he emerged in the 1980s, he was seen as a black Woody Allen and not just because of his glasses and nerdy persona; it was also because he wrote, directed and starred in his superb black-and-white debut, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), and his masterful examination of US race relations, Do The Right Thing (1989). Over time, he stopped acting and stayed behind the camera to make Malcolm X (1992), a biopic of the civil rights leader, and BlacKkKlansman (2018), based on perhaps the most unbelievable true story ever, namely how a black policeman in 1970s Colorado infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan.

Best films: Do The Right Thing (1989); BlacKkKlansman (2018).

45. Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977)

Clouzot began making films in the most controversial circumstances, working for a German-owned company in Occupied France. Naturally, his reputation suffered, but his own period of exile from French film gave him extraordinary insight into exiles in general, an understanding that animated his three greatest films. The first was Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) (1953), in which several Europeans in South America resort to driving nitro-glycerine over a mountain range to put out an oilfield fire, in order to earn the money to return home. It is the greatest action movie ever made because it is the most plausible action movie ever made. Clouzot followed it up with the French-set Les Diaboliques (The Devils) (1955), a truly horrific thriller in which a wife and mistress conspire to murder the man they both once loved. Finally, he made Le mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) (1956), about Picasso’s working practices, which is one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

Best films: Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) (1953); Les Diaboliques (The Devils) (1955).

46. Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007)

It is hard enough for a director to be considered the mother or father of a country’s cinema, as Satyajit Ray is in India, but to carry the weight of an entire continent, as Ousmane Sembène – “The Father of African Cinema” – does, must be overwhelming. Nevertheless, if anyone is deserving of such a title, it is Sembène. His greatest film is La noire de… (Black Girl) (1966). Based on his own short story, it told the tale of a young African woman who hopes to become a childminder in Europe, but in reality, she is treated little better than a slave. So many of the themes of Sembène’s later films, including Emitaï (1971), about a colonial revolt against Vichy France, are evident in La noire de… (Black Girl), especially the collision between the supposedly developed world and the supposedly developing world, an idea that is even more important in the 21st century and our age of climate change than in the 20th century.

Best film: La noire de… (Black Girl) (1966).

47. F.W. Murnau (1888-1931)

Murnau was one of the first German directors to move to Hollywood, doing so by choice in 1926, unlike the flood of Jewish German and Austrian directors who followed him, out of necessity, in the following decade. He was a great Expressionist director, for whom film was the perfect medium to subvert reality in order to enhance individual perspective, especially fear. His finest German film was Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), which, along with Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) was the best and scariest of the early vampire films. However, he surpassed it with Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), which is often called the greatest silent film ever made. It is also arguably the greatest coming-to-the-city film, showing the process of urbanization that still sweeps the world today, which film has been uniquely able to capture.

Best films: Nosferatu (1922); Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

48. Julie Dash (born 1952)

Unlike Lean or Linklater, Dash’s name is misleading, as her directorial style is calm, even slow, gently unfurling like a great river, and occasionally doubling back on itself like a great river, with its non-linear elements. All of that is most evident in her greatest film, Daughters of the Dust (1991), an independent yet epic film about three generations of women from the Gullah ethnic group in South Carolina, who, because of their relative geographical isolation, have remained arguably the most African of all African-American people. The individual journeys of these women are emblematic of The Great Migration of black people from the South to the North of the USA during the 20th century.

Best films: Daughters of the Dust (1991).

49. John Huston (1906-1987)

The Hustons are the closest Hollywood gets to royalty, with three generations of the family having been major players, from grandfather Walter to grandson Danny. However, the most celebrated Huston is John (son of Walter and father of Danny). He was a director for nearly half a century, from The Maltese Falcon (1941), the first great film noir, to The Dead (1987), his adaptation of Joyce’s sublime short story, which he made as he was dying and which is arguably the greatest last film of any director. In between, he made many masterpieces, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), starring his father; The Asphalt Jungle (1950), one of the greatest film noirs; and The Misfits (1961), which, other than the incomparable Some Like It Hot, is Marilyn Monroe’s greatest film.

Best films: The Maltese Falcon (1941); The Asphalt Jungle (1950); The Dead (1987).

50. Céline Sciamma (born 1978)

Sciamma is probably the greatest French film director of the 21st century, offering a female and gay counterpoint to so many of the great male and straight French directors of the 20th century. Her breakthrough was Tomboy (2011), the story of a young girl mistaken for a boy who decides to retain her wrongly assigned gender. It established many of Sciamma’s major traits as a director: a distinctively female gaze; a fascination with sexual fluidity that makes her a spiritual heir to Wilder and Fassbinder; and a sumptuous visual style. However, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) is her greatest film. The title evoked Henry James and traditional period drama, but its depiction of a lesbian love affair in the late 18th century was truly incendiary.

Best films: Tomboy (2011); Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019).

51. John Cassavetes (1929-1989)

Cassavetes was virtually the inventor of indie or independent film-making in America and elsewhere. Earlier directors, such as Kubrick in America and Ray in India, had begun their careers by making films virtually on their own (writing, directing and carrying out many other roles besides), but Cassavetes effectively did so throughout his entire career. He began with Shadows (1959), one of the first American films to examine US race relations, and continued (while Cassavetes acted occasionally in mainstream Hollywood films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967)) throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As an actor, he knew how to elicit the best and most truthful of screen performances from actors, notably his wife and muse Gena Rowlands, in low-budget but high-octane classics such as A Woman Under The Influence (1974), in which Rowlands gave probably the greatest screen depiction of an alcoholic, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), an utterly compelling crime film that is every bit as low-key and almost documentary-like as its title suggests.

Best films: A Woman Under The Influence (1974); The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).

52. Alain Resnais (1922-2014)

The third great filmmaker of the French nouvelle vague (new wave), after Godard and Truffaut, did not really identify with that movement, because his own vision was always so singular and idiosyncratic. Before the new wave even broke, he made a short but hugely influential documentary about Nazi concentration camps, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1956). Then, as if he somehow felt that making fiction films was almost pointless after documenting real-life atrocities, he made two of the most enigmatic, if not downright baffling, films ever made: Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima My Love) (1959), obliquely reflecting on the aftermath of the first nuclear bomb; and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961), which even more obliquely tells the story of a possible love affair between two people that may or may not have taken place.

Best films: Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1956); Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima my love) (1959); L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961).

53. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)

Pasolini was a polymath, writing plays and poetry before becoming one of Fellini’s co-writers on masterpieces including Nights of Cabiria (1959) and La Dolce Vita (1961). Inevitably, such a strong-willed individual, who was openly gay and Marxist but fascinated by Christianity, struck out on his own as a director, combining all his disparate interests in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), which effectively used Matthew’s Gospel as its screenplay. His most controversial and commercially successful film was Teorema (Theorem) (1968), in which Terence Stamp, one of the stars of 60s cinema, plays a mysterious young man who seduces, in turn, all the members of a wealthy family.

Best films: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964); Teorema (Theorem) (1968).

54. The Coen Brothers (Joel, born 1954, and Ethan, born 1957)

The Coens are the only regular directorial team or partnership on this list, although Joel (the elder) usually received sole credit for directing and Ethan sole credit for producing. Regardless of the precise division of their responsibilities, they assembled one of the greatest bodies of work of any late 20th-century film-maker (or film-makers), including debut Blood Simple (1984), a reinvention of noir, babynapping comedy Raising Arizona (1987), screenwriter noir Barton Fink (1991), stoner screwball comedy The Big Lebowski (1998) and epic drug drama No Country For Old Men (2007). And the fact that they virtually invented their own genres, or at least sub-genres, says everything about their knowledge and subversion of the cinematic canon.

Best films: Blood Simple (1984); Barton Fink (1991); The Big Lebowski (1998).

55. Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

Michelangelo Antonioni may not have been as great as the original Renaissance Michelangelo, but he was still a great film director. His finest films were his “Modernity” Trilogy, examining how late 20th-century life had become, for so many people, almost unliveable. In L’Avventura (The Adventure) (1960), a beautiful girl goes missing in the Mediterranean and her companions initially search for her before mysteriously abandoning the search; in La Notte (The Night) (1961), a marriage unravels in a single day; and L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962) examined the love affair between a beautiful young woman (played by Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s muse in all three films) and a handsome but relatively dull stockbroker.

Best films: L’Avventura (The Adventure) (1960); L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962).

56. Marcel Carné (1906-1996)

Marcel Carné directed over 20 films in a career lasting nearly 50 years, but the one that dwarves all the others is Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945), which film-makers as great as Brando and Truffaut have said is the best film ever made. It was something of a miracle it was made at all, because it was filmed during the last three years of France’s occupation during WW2, but that it is so marvelous is a genuine cinematic miracle. Set in the Parisian theatre world of the 1830s, it was really a perfect parable about survival (personal and artistic) under the most oppressive occupation, such as that of the Nazis.

Best film: Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945).

57. Roman Polanski (born 1933)

Alongside Woody Allen and Elia Kazan, Roman Polanski is one of what might be called The Unholy Trinity of great directors on this list: unequivocally great directors who will probably be permanently mired in controversy because of what many consider their personal or political misdeeds. Indeed, Polanski can be considered the worst of them, because unlike Allen and Kazan he was found guilty of criminal charges, namely unlawful sex with a minor in California in 1977, after which he fled America and was convicted in his absence. Nevertheless, set against that crime must be his many cinematic masterpieces, from the early Polish classics such as Knife in the Water (1962) to his great (and bloody) Macbeth (1971), made in the wake of his wife Sharon Tate’s murder by the Manson “family”, to his greatest film, Chinatown (1975), a genuine contender for the title of the greatest film ever made.

Best films: Knife In The Water (1962); Chinatown (1975).

58. Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973)

Like the two Steve McQueens, there are two great Melvilles: the author of Moby Dick; and the great French filmmaker who adopted “Melville” as a pseudonym during WW2 and retained it thereafter. Jean-Pierre Melville was a war hero who fought with the French resistance and having survived WW2 he knew the truth of his famous line in À Bout De Souffle (Breathless): “We are all dead men on leave”. He duly made a succession of astonishing war and crime films that were simultaneously life-and-death serious and intensely playful, even at times comic, including: Le Samouraï (1967); and Army of Shadows (1969), which drew on his experience of being a member of France’s “underground army” in WW2.

Best films: Le Samouraï (1967); Army of Shadows (1969).

59. Wong Kar-Wai (born 1958)

In the last decades of British rule and for a short period afterward, Hong Kong was a global center of film-making, with Hollywood eventually poaching many of its finest filmmakers and plotlines. However, its greatest director, Wong Kar-Wai, stayed put in the city-state, presumably realizing that its near-claustrophobic intensity and anxiety about an impending Chinese takeover were central to his worldview. Chungking Express (1994) told two separate but similar stories about a policeman’s romantic entanglement, with the second story, centering on a woman inveigling herself into a man’s apartment and then his life, being the standout. However, In The Mood For Love (2000), an end-of-the-millennium Brief Encounter in which a man and a woman discover their spouses are having an affair and contemplate having one of their own, is his most famous and celebrated film.

Best films: Chungking Express (1994); In The Mood For Love (2000).

60. Kathryn Bigelow (born 1951)

Kathryn Bigelow is probably the most successful female Hollywood film director ever (although Greta Gerwig may be fast closing on her). Indeed, she became the first woman ever to win the Best Director Oscar for her almost claustrophobic and certainly fear-inducing thriller about US bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker (2008). That remains her masterpiece, but both before and after it she made several fine and distinctly unusual films, including: Point Break (1991), the story of surfers who become bank robbers; Strange Days (1995), an eve-of-the-millennium thriller about a criminal selling “clips” (virtual reality-like films of other people’s experiences) who becomes involved in a murder mystery; and Detroit (2017), which examined one of America’s worst ever race riots.

Best films: Strange Days (1995); The Hurt Locker (2008).

61. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

Only Pasolini rivals Cocteau as a film director who was equally gifted in other artistic fields. Cocteau wrote both great novels, such as Les Enfants Terribles (1929), and great plays, such as La voix humaine (The Human Voice) (1930). Nevertheless, as a film director, he was a giant of avant-garde or experimental cinema, particularly with La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1946), a truly monstrous fairy-tale, and Le testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus) (1960), which he not only wrote and directed but starred in.

Best films: La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1946); Le testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus) (1960).

62. Max Ophüls (1902-1957)

Like so many Jewish German and Austrian directors, including Lang and Wilder, Ophüls made his way to Hollywood from his native Germany, only his journey was more circuitous than most; indeed, he doubled back by returning to Europe in the 1950s. Relatively late in his directorial career, he made great films on both sides of the Atlantic: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), based on Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella, was made in the US and is one of the great cinematic tragedies, showing how a philanderer can ignore the true love that lies under his nose; while La Ronde (1950), based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play, is one of the great cinematic comedies, or even absurdities, in showing (through an anthology of stories) how love really is a roundabout that leaves everyone dizzy. Finally, Madame de… (or The Earrings of Madame de…) (1953) might be his finest film of all, in its Shakespearean combination of comedy and tragedy.

Best films: La Ronde (1950); Madame de… (or The Earrings of Madame de…) (1953).

63. Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1983)

“Sandy” Mackendrick was the greatest of the Ealing Comedy directors, overseeing such classics as Whisky Galore! (1949), his debut and the film that really launched the studio (which is still the only studio ever to have a genre named after it), and arguably the greatest of all Ealing comedies, The Ladykillers (1955). Emboldened by such triumphs, he headed back to America, where he had been born, and made his US debut, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a film noir about the New York publicity industry that was as acidic as his British debut had been sweet. However, for all its jet-black brilliance (or perhaps because of it), Sweet Smell of Success was not a box-office success and Mackendrick’s directorial career never recovered. Over sixty years on, however, it is rightly regarded as one of the darkest and most disturbing dramas ever filmed.

Best films: Whisky Galore! (1949); The Ladykillers (1955); Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

64. Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-1996)

Kieślowski just edges Andrzej Wajda as the second-greatest Polish film director behind Roman Polanski. That is because his Dekalog: The Ten Commandments (1989) series of 10 one-hour films, originally made for TV, is arguably the greatest series of related films ever made by any director anywhere. As an awe-struck Kubrick put it, to have made one of these films would have been remarkable; to have made all 10 is almost beyond belief. They are all outstanding, but first and second among equals are A Short Film About Killing, a more plausible and realistic A Clockwork Orange in which the brutal murder of a taxi driver by a drifter is juxtaposed with his own even more brutal murder by the state, and A Short Film About Love, one of the most heart-breaking films ever made about the inability, or at least rarity, of love between two people being both mutual and simultaneous.

Best films: Dekalog: The Ten Commandments (1989) – all ten.

65. Éric Rohmer (1920-2010)

The fourth great male filmmaker of the French nouvelle vague, Rohmer was an outsider in that group. Like Godard and Truffaut, he began in film by writing for (and later editing) Cahiers du Cinema, the magazine co-founded by the great theorist André Bazin that is the most important film publication ever. He followed the others into film-making, but his own films were qualitatively different; they were quieter, less obviously showy, but often even more devastating in their revelations about the realities of human life. From My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Claire’s Knee (1970), through several 1970s and 1980s masterpieces such as Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray) (1986), to the late “Seasons” films, especially Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter) (1992), which reimagined Shakespeare’s late and magical romance for the late 20th century, Rohmer’s body of work was as quiet, calm and majestic as the Atlantic or the Mediterranean on a still summer’s day.

Best films: My Night at Maud’s (1969); Claire’s Knee (1970); Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray) (1986).

66. Werner Herzog (born 1942)

Born during WW2, Herzog became one of the German filmmakers who, like Kraftwerk in popular music, reimagined and rebranded Germany after the horrors of Nazification. Indeed, so prolific has he been that he has effectively had two careers in the last half-century. The first was as a director of fantastical features, many of them the most animated period dramas ever made, such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), about the Spanish Conquistadors who conquered South America but destroyed themselves in the process, and Fitzcarraldo (1982), a biopic of a Peruvian rubber baron who transported a steamship over a mountain, which Herzog literally recreated on screen. Latterly, he has mainly made speculative but stunning documentaries, such as Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which is about prehistoric cave paintings. But in both his wild features and more sober documentaries, Herzog’s eternal excitement about film-making and its ability to capture the world more completely and truthfully than any other art-form is always evident.

Best films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972); Fitzcarraldo (1982).

67. David Lynch (born 1946)

David Lynch is still alive but given that he seems to have stopped directing (his last film, Inland Empire, was in 2006), it is possible to assess his entire career. Recently, most focus has been on Mulholland Drive (2001), which mystifyingly headed a 2016 poll of the best films of the 21st century so far when it is questionable whether it is a film at all and not a lesbianism-fixated middle-aged man’s fantasy. Infinitely better are his earlier films, especially Eraserhead (1977), one of the greatest cinematic debuts and still one of the most sui generis films ever made; The Elephant Man (1980), his beautiful black-and-white biopic of Victorian “freakshow” act and medical marvel John Merrick; and Blue Velvet (1986), his noir/horror/fantasy peek behind the net curtains of middle America, which anticipated (and bettered) so much of his later work, including TV phenomenon Twin Peaks.

Best films: Eraserhead (1977); Blue Velvet (1986).

68. Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984)

Probably more than any other director, Peckinpah introduced the bloody violence that so much of late 20th-century and early 21st-century cinema (and all other screen storytelling) is saturated in. That is directly attributable to his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (1969), a rewriting of the Western genre and arguably the entirety of Western civilization to show (in graphic and often slow-motion detail) the bloodshed that lies behind almost all supposed technological and social “progress”. In particular, Peckinpah introduced the machine-gun to the Western, showing how it literally swept (and killed) all before it. Set in 1913, The Wild Bunch used veteran Hollywood actors, including William Holden and Robert Ryan, to play veteran outlaws somehow trying to survive in a rapidly changing world and using any means necessary to do so.

Best film: The Wild Bunch (1969).

69. Steve McQueen (born 1969)

Arguably the greatest achievement of Steve McQueen is that anyone hearing his name no longer automatically thinks of the Hollywood legend but instead at least considers the possibility that the reference is to the great black British director. Having originally been a successful visual or video artist, McQueen graduated to mainstream/major film-making with Hunger (2008), about the 1981 IRA hunger strikers, and Shame (2011), about sex addiction, before making 12 Years A Slave (2013). That adaptation of the book of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free African-American who was kidnapped and enslaved, won the Best Picture Oscar although, controversially, McQueen did not win the Best Director Oscar and to this date there has never been a black Best Director Oscar winner. Since then, McQueen has worked in other media as well as film, notably television, for which he made the Small Axe (2020) series of TV films about black British life, the standout being Lovers Rock, a beautifully simple, moving and funny film about a 1980 house party.

Best films: 12 Years A Slave (2013); Lovers Rock (2020).

70. Zhang Yimou (born 1950)

China’s emergence as a superpower at the end of the 20th century coincided with the long-overdue emergence of its filmmakers on the global stage. The greatest of them was Zhang Yimou, whose debut, Red Sorghum (1987), featured many of the elements that would define his later films, including historical subject matter and the presence of his star and muse, Gong Li. In the next decade, he produced several superb films, including The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), in which Gong Li plays a peasant in contemporary China who seeks justice after her husband is mistreated by a local official but gets more “justice” than she ever could have imagined, and To Live (1994), an almost absurdist examination of China’s tumultuous 20th century, in which a man losing his fortune proves to be incredible good luck as it saves him from the purge of the rich that follows Mao’s revolution.

Best films: The Story of Qiu Ju (1992); To Live (1994).

71. Otto Preminger (1905-1986)

In a parallel universe in which the Nazis never gained power in Germany, the European film industry in general and the German and Austrian film industries in particular might just have rivaled Hollywood in their global reach, notwithstanding the obvious obstacle of the increasing universality of English. Certainly, Hollywood owed Hitler a huge debt, because so many of its greatest directors in the mid-20th century were émigrés or refugees, including Otto Preminger. Safe and professionally revitalized in California, he initially made great film noirs, such as Laura (1944), Where The Sidewalk Ends (1950) and Angel Face (1951), before moving on to more controversial, indeed taboo-challenging, material in The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), which examined drug addiction, and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in which a rape case becomes perhaps the finest courtroom drama ever filmed.

Best films: Laura (1944); Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

72. Miloš Forman (1932-2018)

Forman was the most successful of the Czech filmmakers who flourished in the Prague Spring of 1968 and then largely fled Czechoslovakia after the brutal Soviet suppression of that all-too-brief period of liberalization. His best Czech film was The Firemen’s Ball (1967), in which the absurd and corrupt events during the annual party of a small town’s fire brigade stand in for all the absurdity and corruption of Eastern European Communism. However, he is far better known for one of the seminal films of Hollywood’s Second Golden Age, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), in which his quintessential outsider’s eye captured so much of the insanity of America. And nearly a decade later, his adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s great play about Mozart and his rival Salieri, Amadeus (1984), was a worthy addition to his small but fairly perfect Atlantic-straddling canon.

Best films: The Firemen’s Ball (1967); One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

73. Hayao Miyazaki (born 1941)

A co-founder in 1985 of the now world-famous Studio Ghibli, which has become perhaps the most celebrated animation studio since Disney, Miyazaki is the most successful exponent of its now globally renowned manga style. His best early film was My Neighbour Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) (1988), which is probably the best film ever made about children and their “imaginary” friends, but he has surpassed it several times since, with such color and idea-saturated masterpieces as Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) (2001), about a girl whose parents are turned into pigs by vengeful spirits, and Howl’s Moving Castle (Hauru no Ugoku Shiro) (2004), about a young girl’s journey to a magical but war-torn kingdom. However, for all his mastery of stories about children and their unfettered imaginations, Miyazaki’s best film may just be his most serious, even “adult” film, The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2013), an extraordinary animated biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the Japanese inventor of the Mitsubishi fighter planes, so many of which were ultimately used in kamikaze (or suicide) missions.

Best films: Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) (2001); The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2013).

74. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1983)

The younger brother of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-writer (and original story creator) of Citizen Kane (1941), Joseph presumably learned from the frustrations of his older brother’s career, which ended in an early death through alcoholism, by eventually becoming a director after many years as a screenwriter. His success as a director was instant and absolute, as he won Oscars for both Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay in consecutive years for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and, even more impressively, All About Eve (1950), the greatest film about theatre (and female-female relationships) ever made. He never matched that stellar success but still produced several masterpieces, including: Julius Caesar (1953), one of the greatest Shakespeare films (which proved Brando could play the Bard); Guys and Dolls (1955), one of the greatest Hollywood musicals; and the unfairly pilloried Cleopatra (1963), which is actually one of the greatest Hollywood epics.

Best films: All About Eve (1950); Julius Caesar (1953); Guys and Dolls (1955).

75. Bong Joon-Ho (born 1969)

Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019) was the first foreign language (or, more accurately, non-English language) film to win the Best Picture Oscar, just before the Coronavirus pandemic shut down the world and left everyone feeling as entrapped as the poor family surreptitiously squatting in a rich family’s house. It brought Joon-Ho to global attention, but it soon became apparent that it was the culmination of a long career encompassing several genres, including Memories of Murder (2003), a crime drama based on South Korea’s first serial killer, and Snowpiercer (2013), the beautifully realized adaptation of a post-apocalyptic comic about a train traversing the planet with the last surviving human beings.

Best films: Memories of Murder (2003); Parasite (2019).

76. Quentin Tarantino (born 1963)

Tarantino is probably the last film director to conquer global popular culture, as so many great directors had done before him but few, if any, have done after him. That is because film has gradually been marginalized by the rise of TV and the advent of streaming, which has largely turned the public viewing of films on big screens into the private viewing of films on small screens (even mobile/cell phone screens). Tarantino’s then-unique but now much-copied combination of graphic violence and pop-culture-quoting wisecracking, especially in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), literally made his name, to the extent that “Tarantino-esque” is probably the most commonly used critical term in cinema over the last 30 years.

Best films: Reservoir Dogs (1992); Pulp Fiction (1994).

77. Victor Fleming (1889-1949)

Victor Fleming is the great director who even many cineastes have not heard of, although they will certainly know his two greatest films: The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind (both 1939). And the fact that they were both made within the same year, back to back, surely explains why Fleming had to be temporarily replaced by another director, Sam Wood, during the making of the latter, due to exhaustion. Nevertheless, both are amazing movies, whose complete difference is a testament to Fleming’s versatility. The Wizard of Oz is the ultimate cinematic fantasy, which, unlike so many films of its time, continues to entrance viewers nearly a century on. By contrast, Gone With The Wind, for all the justified controversy surrounding its celebration of the slave-owning South, remains a marvel of real, non-CGI film-making, especially in its “Atlanta Burning” sequence. 1939 is often regarded as the apex of Hollywood’s original golden age and Fleming is a major reason why.

Best films: The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind (both 1939).

78. Jane Campion (born 1954)

Campion is not only one of the greatest female film directors but arguably the greatest avowedly feminist film-maker, with her films always emphasizing the importance of “the female gaze”, not so much in terms of appreciating male (or other female) beauty but in insisting on the importance of the female perspective, however marginalized or hidden it has been before. After early films in the Antipodes, her global breakthrough was The Piano (1993), which was almost Werner Herzog-like in its extraordinary portrayal of the titular instrument being transported across the world from Scotland to New Zealand, to join its mute owner in her new life in a new world. And nearly thirty years later, she returned to cinematic pre-eminence with The Power of the Dog (2021), a 20th-century Western that directly examined the toxicity of so much Western (in every sense) masculinity.

Best films: The Piano (1993); The Power of the Dog (2021).

79. Sergio Leone (1929-1989)

Leone was the man who effectively sold snow to the Eskimos, or, more precisely, reanimated the Western genre in Europe and then sold it back to America and indeed the whole world. The term “Spaghetti Western” was coined to capture this strange 1960s cultural phenomenon, whereby Leone, an Italian film-maker in thrall to America’s definitive genre even as America itself seemed to be abandoning it, employed upcoming or established American stars to head up revisionist, dialogue-light (to reduce the need for non-English-speaking supporting actors to speak too much) movies. The “Dollars Trilogy” of Westerns – A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) – made Clint Eastwood a star. Then Leone reinvented perpetual good-guy Henry Fonda as a super-villain in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), before finally realizing his lifelong ambition to make an American film in America with the gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

Best films: Once Upon A Time In The West (1968); Once Upon A Time In America (1984).

80. Ridley Scott (born 1937)

Scott’s debut, The Duellists (1977), was a fine period drama. However, he was simultaneously shaken and galvanized by the phenomenal success of another film released that year, Star Wars, so he exchanged period drama for sci-fi and became one of the masters of the genre, achieving the rare artistic hat-trick of making three great films in one genre: Alien (1979), which was the anti-Star Wars in its dark and claustrophobic depiction of a predatory alien aboard a spaceship; Blade Runner (1982), the dazzling adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s finest writing; and The Martian (2015), about a race against time to rescue an astronaut stranded on the Red Planet. He has made fine films in other genres, notably Thelma and Louise (1991), the first and so far only great feminist road movie, but it is for his fantastically evocative future-scapes that Scott will be remembered.

Best films: Alien (1979); Blade Runner (1982).

81. Preston Sturges (1898-1959)

That Preston Sturges is not as well-known as he should be, especially outside his native US, is probably because his imperial phase, during which he made some of the most sublime screen comedies ever, coincided with WW2. Nevertheless, if Hitchcock’s thrillers dominated the 1950s, Sturges’s ultra-screwball comedies dominated the 1940s. The Lady Eve (1941) paired con-woman Barbara Stanwyck and straight-laced Henry Fonda as the unlikeliest of couples aboard an ocean liner; Sullivan’s Travels (also 1941) satirized serious film-makers’ pretensions to art while celebrating the sheer joy of cinema itself, such as the Disney cartoon that a group of prisoners (including the freshly incarcerated Sullivan himself) revel in; and The Palm Beach Story (1942) showed a penniless young couple seemingly being saved by a wealthy old man only to discover there are strings attached. Ironically, with the end of WW2, Sturges seemed to lose his knack for making the world (or at least America) laugh and he never reached such heights again.

Best films: The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels (both 1941).

82. William Friedkin (1935-2023)

The recently deceased William Friedkin never had the longevity of a Coppola, let alone a Scorsese, but for a brief period in the early 1970s he was their equal, if not their superior for mastering two completely different genres: crime, with The French Connection (1971), the film that virtually invented The Wire thirty years later; and horror, with The Exorcist (1973), which was probably the best and certainly the most commercially successful horror film ever made up to that point. Perhaps it was his decision not to helm The French Connection II (1975), with John Frankenheimer instead taking over, that stopped him in his tracks, preventing him from establishing a French Connection series to rival that of The Godfather, but whatever the reason Friedkin never scaled those heights again. However, Sorcerer (1977), a loose remake of Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) (1953), has gained critical acclaim since its release, largely because of its championing by Tarantino.

Best films: The French Connection (1971); The Exorcist (1973).

83. Greta Gerwig (born 1983)

With the possible exception of Ida Lupino, Gerwig may be the first cinematic muse ever to take over the director’s chair. Having first appeared as an actress in the films of Noah Baumbach, the “21st-century Woody Allen” who is also her life partner and father of her two children, Gerwig took the helm of a film herself with Lady Bird (2017), one of the finest recent films about the traumas of adolescence; Little Women (2019), which may just be the best ever version of the oft-filmed Louisa May Alcott novel; and, most spectacularly this summer, Barbie (2023), which, alongside Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (also 2023), may just have reinvented the big-screen spectacle that so many 21st-century films have lacked, especially since the pandemic.

Best films: Lady Bird (2017); Little Women (2019); Barbie (2023).

84. Robert Aldrich (1918-1983)

Aldrich is a great director whose greatest films are more famous than he is and he would probably be happy with that, as he subverted his own ego to the films he made and was happy to jump genres. Yet his filmography is as impressive as those of far more famous directors, including: Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the great “nuclear-noir”; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which united old rivals Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in a film about fading (or even forgotten) movie stars; The Dirty Dozen (1967), the genre-subverting WW2 film about criminals being offered their freedom in return for participation in a suicide mission; and Ulzana’s Raid (1972), the greatest “Vietnam Western” ever made.

Best films: The Dirty Dozen (1967); Ulzana’s Raid (1972).

85. Carol Reed (1906-1976)

Reed’s best work came in close collaboration with the great novelist Graham Greene, who did his best screenwriting on two post-war classics directed by Reed: The Fallen Idol (1948), based on a Greene short story about how the son of a wealthy family comes to suspect their butler, who he worships, of murder; and The Third Man (1949), arguably the best British film ever made and certainly the film with the greatest location or setting ever, namely post-war Vienna (including its sewers). Before those two, Reed made arguably the only great British expressionist film, Odd Man Out (1947), written by another “Green” (F.L., not Graham), in which James Mason played an IRA man on the run who comes to feel that the whole of Belfast is literally closing in on him.

Best films: Odd Man Out (1947); The Third Man (1949).

86. Charles Burnett (born 1944)

Burnett is one of the few African-American directors to have had a long career, but it is his astonishing debut, Killer of Sheep (1978), on which his reputation largely rests. A one-film antidote to the excesses and stereotypes of the Blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, Killer of Sheep is like a post-war Italian neorealist classic filmed thirty years later in the perpetually poor and troubled Watts district of LA. Almost plotless in its depiction of ordinary African-American life, but still completely gripping, it tells the story of the titular abattoir worker who tragically comes to realize that he has little more control over his own life than the sheep he routinely slaughters.

Best film: Killer of Sheep (1978).

87. Anthony Mann (1906-1967)

If John Ford was King of the Western, Anthony Mann was at least a Prince, principally for the great Westerns he made with Jimmy Stewart in the 1950s, when Stewart was as much Mann’s on-screen alter-ego as John Wayne was for Ford. Among the best of the eight Stewart-starring Westerns Mann made were: Winchester ’73 (1950), their first film together and arguably the Western with the most brilliant plot device of following the titular gun as it moves between different owners; and The Man From Laramie (1955), their final collaboration, in which the ownership of a gun is again central, as Stewart attempts to find the man who sold repeating rifles to the Apache who killed his brother. Feted by the French nouvelle vague as one of the best post-war American directors, alongside Ray, Aldrich and Richard Brooks, Mann moved from the Western to the foundation of Western civilization, directing the last great Hollywood epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

Best films: Winchester ’73 (1950); The Man From Laramie (1955); The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

88. Vincente Minnelli (1903-1986)

Liza inherited song-and-dance DNA from her father, because he was probably the greatest director of Hollywood musicals, including: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the ultimate Christmas musical that starred Liza’s mother, Judy Garland; An American In Paris (1951), based on George Gershwin’s great orchestral composition of the same name and starring Gene Kelly; and Gigi (1958), starring Leslie Caron and based on the Colette short novel of the same name. His finest non-musical film was Lust for Life (1956), the Kirk Douglas-starring biopic of Vincent van Gogh.

Best films: Meet Me In St. Louis (1944); Gigi (1958).

89. Nicolas Roeg (1928-2018)

Roeg is one of the surprisingly few great cinematographers (in the 1960s, he worked with everyone from Lean to Truffaut) to become a great director. Indeed, as if wary of taking full control of a film for the first time, he co-directed Performance (1970), the counterculture classic that brought West End pop stars and East End gangsters to the same dilapidated mansion, with Donald Cammell. Thereafter, he assumed sole control of the director’s chair. For the rest of the 1970s, he made wildly varying films, whose main similarity was his trademark fractured editing style, including Walkabout (1971), in which two English schoolchildren are rescued in the Australian bush by an Aboriginal/Indigenous Australian; and Don’t Look Now (1973), simultaneously the sexiest and darkest horror film ever made.

Best films: Performance (1970); Don’t Look Now (1973).

90. John Schlesinger (1926-2003)

Schlesinger was one of the few film directors who successfully bridged the Atlantic, as it were. He established a reputation as one of the leading British neorealist (or, more prosaically, “kitchen sink” drama) directors of the early 1960s with Billy Liar (1963), a fantastic film about a fantasist, and then wondrously adapted Far From The Madding Crowd (1967), which remains the best Thomas Hardy film ever made. In America, he made Midnight Cowboy (1969), a movie about a male prostitute and his pimp that became the first X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar. In the 1970s, Schlesinger made at least one more British masterpiece, Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), one of the first serious examinations on screen of non-heterosexuality, and at least one more US masterpiece, The Day of the Locust (1975), an adaptation of Nathanael West’s 1920s novel about a set designer experiencing a personal apocalypse in Hollywood.

Best films: Far From The Madding Crowd (1967); The Day of the Locust (1975).

91. Peter Weir (born 1944)

Peter Jackson, overlord of Lord of the Rings, is the most commercially successful Antipodean film director but Peter Weir is the most artistic Antipodean film director (who has also enjoyed considerable commercial success). That would be true if Weir had only ever made Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), one of the most haunting films ever made about a group of schoolgirls in 1900 Australia who mysteriously disappeared. If he never quite scaled that creative height again, well, arguably few directors anywhere have. He still made several superb films both in Australia, such as the WWI drama Gallipoli (1981), about Australia’s greatest wartime tragedy, and in America, especially The Truman Show (1998), which anticipated both reality TV and Barbie.

Best films: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); The Truman Show (1998).

92. Elia Kazan (1909-2003)

Kazan was a titan of both theatre and film – Broadway and Hollywood – having directed both the stage and screen versions of the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire, in the screen version of which a sweaty, bevested and genuinely menacing Marlon Brando virtually reinvented screen acting. However, in what is probably the most bizarre example of art imitating life in the history of cinema, Kazan lived out a real-life version of On The Waterfront (1954), as his film about a dockworker giving evidence against the Mafia bosses who controlled the docks mirrored his own testimony against suspected Communists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, at the height of the Communist witch-hunts. His reputation never fully recovered, but like other controversial directors on this list, such as Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, the perceived personal failings of the man should not completely obscure the greatness of the artist.

Best films: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); On The Waterfront (1954).

93. Bill Forsyth (born 1946)

With the possible exception of Alexander Mackendrick, the great Ealing comedy director (who was actually born in America), Bill Forsyth is the greatest Scottish film director. At his peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was virtually a one-man Ealing Studios, only one that was based in Scotland at the start of Thatcherism rather than being based in London at the end of WW2. In just five years, he made an ultra-low-budget debut, That Sinking Feeling (1979), about the world’s worst heist (of stainless steel sinks); Gregory’s Girl (1980), the greatest film ever made about adolescence; Local Hero (1983), an Ealing-esque comedy about the coming-together of big oil and a small Scottish fishing village; and Comfort and Joy (1984), an almost unclassifiable film that was ostensibly about an ice-cream war in Glasgow but took in so much more besides.

Best films: Gregory’s Girl (1980); Local Hero (1983).

94. Richard Linklater (born 1960)

Arguably more than any other director in the late 20th and early 21st century, Linklater has captured the increasingly fragmented and dislocated nature of late American (and by extension Western) civilization, with stories that are often non-linear and, just like his name, “link later”, if they ever link up at all. His debut, Slacker (1990), named an entire generation; his “Before” Trilogy, especially the first film Before Sunrise (1995), are among the best romantic films (not just romantic comedies) of the last thirty years; and Boyhood (2014) is possibly the best and certainly the most authentic coming-of-age film ever, as Linklater filmed a young boy over 12 years, between the ages of six and 18, as he literally turned from boy to man.

Best films: Slacker (1990); Before Sunrise (1995); Boyhood (2014).

95. Todd Haynes (born 1961)

If Haynes is not the greatest gay film director ever (an admittedly small pool, for obvious reasons, principally the criminalization of homosexuality for most of film history), he is certainly the most high-profile and commercially successful gay film director ever, at least in the English language. His first film was an extended short, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), an avowedly experimental biopic of the 70s singing sensation that controversially used Barbie dolls to tell her story and convey her struggle with anorexia, which has been rediscovered in the wake of the official Barbie film (2023). His first feature was Poison (1991), a gay anthology film, but his masterpiece is Carol (2015), an adaptation of an early and autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith called The Price of Salt (1950). It is not just the greatest lesbian love story captured on film but one of the greatest love stories captured on film full-stop.

Best films: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987); Carol (2015).

96. Fernando Meirelles (born 1955) and Kátia Lund (born 1966) (Co-directors)

Cidade de Deus (City of God) (2002) not only edges Glauber Rocha’s black-and-white 1960s classic Black God, White Devil (1964) as the best Brazilian film ever made; it might be the best South American film ever made, if not the best film ever made in the so-called “developing world”. As such, its male and female co-directing team of Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund merit inclusion in any list of the greatest directors and are the only directing partnership, or co-directors, to make this list other than the Coen Brothers (who, officially at least, are a directing and producing team). It was Robert Altman who declared, upon seeing Cidade de Deus (City of God), that it was not just the best film of that year (2002) but possibly the best film ever made. And such high praise from another great director is entirely justified for this slum-set epic about the rise of organized (and disorganized) crime in Rio between the 1960s and 1980s.

Best film: Cidade de Deus (City of God) (2002).

97. Lynne Ramsay (born 1969)

Alongside Mackendrick and Forsyth, Lynne Ramsay completes a triumvirate of great Scottish film directors, but she stands alone in imposing a female and feminist vision upon the stories of what is often a toxically male country. Her debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), was a classic coming-of-age story set in the literally rat-infested Glasgow tenements of the 1970s and is one of the finest directorial debuts ever. Morvern Callar (2002) built impressively upon Ratcatcher by adapting Alan Warner’s strange and unsettling 1995 novel of the same name about a young woman who steals the credit for a successful novel from her boyfriend, who has committed suicide. And We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) was another successful adaptation of a novel, only on a much bigger budget and scale, as Ramsay, in the tragic age of school massacres, made arguably the great school massacre film.

Best films: Ratcatcher (1999); Morvern Callar (2002); We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011).

98. Jordan Peele (born 1979)

Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is probably the best and certainly the most commercially and critically successful example of post-horror, a new cinematic sub-genre in which the traditional tropes and techniques of horror movies are used to examine more serious and complex ideas and issues. In the case of Get Out, it was the single most important and explosive issue in America, namely race, that was analyzed, as a young black man gradually learns the horrifying truth about his white girlfriend’s family and their black employees/servants. Us (2019) was less commercially successful but still hugely unsettling, as it examined the idea of doubles, doppelgangers and the potential duality of every single human being. And if Nope (2019), which was an acronym for ‘Not of Planet Earth’, was not entirely successful, it was still a fascinating hybrid of sci-fi, children’s film and Hollywood satire.

Best films: Get Out (2017); Us (2019).

99. Kelly Reichardt (born 1964)

Kelly Reichardt is the exemplar of what might be called “the New Western”: films set in her native Oregon that challenge and eventually overturn so many of the stylistic concerns and conventions of “Old Westerns”. Rather than exclusively male renegades such as cowboys and gunslingers, Reichardt’s protagonists are usually working-class men and women, whose lives nevertheless transcend (or at least attempt to transcend) the geographical and economic obstacles that they face. Those ideas were crystallized in her debut, River of Grass (1994), a kind of low-rent, late 20th-century Badlands (1973) about a couple trying to escape the aftermath of a botched break-in, and further examined in Old Joy (2006), a minimalist road (or rather mountain track) movie. And she made an actual Western in Meek’s Cutoff (2010), in which the lives of pioneers’ wives are shown as being as important as those of their husbands.

Best films: River of Grass (1994); Meek’s Cutoff (2010).

100. Nick Park (born 1958)

Animation has almost always existed alongside other film-making and there is an argument that Walt Disney, the man whose Mouse ate the world and continues to eat the universe (including the MCU), is the most successful filmmaker of them all. However, although Disney was literally hands-on with his animation early on, eventually he became more of a film producer or mogul, overseeing others, and so should be judged alongside Warner or Selznick rather than alongside Renoir or Hitchcock. Of all the other great film animators, from Jan Švankmajer to Brad Bird, perhaps the most brilliant is Nick Park, the British creator of that great British double-act Wallace and Gromit. Almost all of their films (both shorts and features) are mini-masterpieces that evoke the genuine anything-goes genius of both the earliest and the best film-making. However, if push comes to shove (or Wensleydale comes to the cheeseboard), The Wrong Trousers (1993), with its villainous Penguin, wins out.

Best films: Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out (1989); Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers (1993); Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave (1995).

CONCLUSION

What?! No Nolan? Or Anderson, Luhrmann or Lupino? Well, the cut-off had to be made somewhere and even those fine directors could not make this list of The 100 Best Directors Ever. But if you feel sufficiently incensed to fight their corner (or the corner of any other director who you feel should have been included), then please let us know. We’d be delighted to consider your own top 10s or even top 100s. This list is just the beginning of what will hopefully be a long and beautiful debate.