100 Abel Ferrara
The street punk
There’s nothing nice about Abel, a guttersnipe with a taste for the outré. His films are grubby notes from the underground lacking taste or (infuriatingly) quality control: rape-revenge in Ms 45, a muddled Madonna in Dangerous Game, gangster chic in King Of New York, Christian confusion in Mary. He’s like Scorsese’s kid brother, not as talented but cut from the same cloth of street Catholicism, violent redemption and cine-passion: “We’re just trying to make one good movie. Not even one good movie. We’re just trying to shoot one great scene…”
Picture perfect Bad Lieutenant, arresting cinema.

99 Sofia Coppola
The dreamer
Rubbish as an actress, eloquent as a filmmaker, Francis’ little angel has taken just three films to fashion her graceful movie chic. If Sofia was adored for The Virgin Suicides (adolescent death eulogy) and Lost In Translation (suitcase gloom sheen), it was the Cannes-booed Marie Antoinette that separated the fickle from the fans. Wilfully vacuous and beautiful, it summed up the cheek of the young superstar: “I guess it was a bit audacious to show first in France!” Dreamy, brave and cool, this Coppola is doing it for herself.
Picture perfect Lost In Translation. Mesmerising misery.

98 John Sturges
The man’s man
An apprenticeship directing training films for the US Army Air Corps during WWII stood ‘Captain’ John Sturges in good stead for his later career as bluff helmer of big-budget, male-oriented actioners. Before The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, though, he’d already landed a Best Director Oscar nod for Bad Day At Black Rock and directed the definitive Wyatt Earp pic, Gunfight At The OK Corral. Ed Zwick correctly identifies him as “a wonderful storyteller who was quite humble in not putting himself in front of the story…”
Picture perfect The gun-blazing The Magnificent Seven.

97 Baz Luhrmann
The showman
Who’d have known that the kitsch-lover behind Strictly Ballroom could deliver a cinematic statement of intent as radical as Romeo + Juliet, mixing Shakespeare with helicopters and handguns? The flamboyant former actor followed up with twirling, lavish pop musical Moulin Rouge!. A perfectionist (“All the films I make are about 60 per cent of what I imagine them to be”) wise to the power of adding theatrical zing to celluloid dreams, he’s about to go epic with period romance Australia. Expect anything but the ordinary.
Picture perfect Moulin Rouge! If music be the food of love…

96 M Night Shyamalan
The phenomenon
The wünderkind polymath who could do no wrong? Lady In The Water put paid to that, its failure giving his many detractors a $75m stick to beat him with. Prior to that, however, Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan was shaping up to be the new Spielberg: a master storyteller with a gift for twists and a keen understanding of public taste. Will he get his mojo back? As far as he’s concerned he didn’t lose it. “Don’t judge movies from commercial success,” he cautions. “It’s my job to be brave and I have been brave...”
Picture perfect The Sixth Sense. Dead brilliant.

95 George Lucas
The spaceman
In 1977, Lucas wowed the world with Star Wars. In 1999, he upset the world with Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Alone, THX 1138 (coldly futuristic) and American Graffiti (warmly nostalgic) would not be enough for this list, but arguably no director has made a work as talked about as George’s original space saga. Sure, he threatened cred with interminable fiddling and a trio of lesser prequels, but the standard was set 30 years ago. “Star Wars is fun, exciting, inspirational,” he says. “It’s what they want.”
Picture Perfect Star Wars. Light(speed) years ahead.

94 Wong Kar-Wai
The last romantic
“We love what we can’t have,” Wong says. From Days Of Being Wild to In The Mood For Love, his world of romantic rhapsody and missed opportunity swoons to the tune of isolating desire. As pale and interesting characters mope and smoke, extravagant colours and lush music shudder in key. Intuition is his method: having written for TV and the derivative Hong Kong film industry, Wong set his form by making zippy breakthrough Chungking Express, on the hoof. Famously, it made Tarantino weep. This is cinema of the moment: you need to feel it.
Picture perfect 2046. The look of love…

93 Alan J Pakula
The conspirator
Already a successful producer by the time he hoisted the megaphone, Bronx-born Pakula proved a dab hand at voicing American anxieties in the Watergate era. But such was the impact of his “paranoia trilogy” – Klute, The Parallax View and seminal drama All The President’s Men – his later works (The Pelican Brief, Presumed Innocent) seemed trifling by comparison. Or were we missing something? “I am oblique,” he said just before his 1998 death. “I like trying to do things which work on many levels...”
Picture perfect All The President’s Men. Paper victory.

92 Paul Verhoeven
The flying dutchman
“Of course there are nude scenes… I’m Dutch!” Verhoeven’s always had a nose for the box office, pulling in punters with lashings of sex and ultraviolence. It’s a basic instinct summed up in that Sharon Stone crotch shot. Even his early Dutch work was more grindhouse than arthouse: see the bold eroticism of Turkish Delight or Spetters. When Hollywood beckoned, Verhoeven impressed with ironic/iconic sci-fi(Robocop, Starship Troopers) until success bred excess (Showgirls). Returning home triggered a comeback in Black Book’s pulp blend of Nazis, sex and dyed fannies. Well, he is Dutch…
Picture perfect RoboCop, future shock.

91 DW Griffith
The pioneer
“Remember how small the world was before I came along?” Undistinguished writer/actor David Wark Griffith wasn’t afraid of blowing his own trumpet… and with good reason, for he invented a new language of cinema through innovative use of cross-cutting, close-ups and characterisation. Co-founder of United Artists, his rep will forever remain stained by the KKK sympathies of The Birth Of A Nation, but several of his silents have stayed golden: Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans Of The Storm.
Picture perfect Intolerance. The Crash of its day.

90 Curtis Hanson
The adaptor
A self-confessed movie buff with a journalistic background, Hanson cut his teeth in Hitchcockian suspense (The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, The River Wild) before helming LA Confidential, his Oscar-winning calling card. Since then he’s made as many hits (8 Mile, In Her Shoes) as misses (the underrated Wonder Boys, Lucky You). With no obvious visual style, his skills lie more in his empathy with actors and immaculate storytelling. “I just go to what interests me,” he smiles. “I always ask myself: is this a world I want to go into and learn about?”
Picture perfect LA Confidential. Hollywood homicide.

89 Peter Weir
The wizard of Oz
“Frankly, I’ve never fit in anywhere,” is Peter Weir’s take on his place in life. To anyone who’s seen his films, that’ll come as no great shock. From the dreamy uncertainty of Picnic At Hanging Rock through his shift to Hollywood and bracing movies like Witness, Dead Poets’ Society and The Truman Show, Weir has always majored in alienation. Occasionally a love of lush visuals overwhelms the story, but few modern directors can match the Aussie when it comes to old-school big glossy movies with a brain.
Picture perfect The Truman Show. Big Brother’s watching you.

88 Buster Keaton
The master of disaster
One of cinema’s most beautiful faces (did Garbo ever battle hurricanes, leap from trains or play billiards with a hand grenade?), Joseph Frank Keaton was hurled into a chaotic, vaudeville world. He took it on the chin – and became not just a genius comedian, but a true master of the medium. The General is a Civil War romance to rival Gone With The Wind, Steamboat Bill, Jr an amazing disaster epic and Sherlock Jr still looks like a modern marvel, as Keaton’s projectionist sleepwalks into his own film. Spectacular and seriously funny.
Picture perfect The General. Definitely a bumpy ride.

87 Gus Van Sant
The slacker
Gus Van Sant’s the master of capturing slacker youth, crafting a haunting, lyrical mood as he does it. He’s dabbled in multiplex fodder (Good Will Hunting, the Psycho misstep), but this middle-class boy’s heart has pulsed for dysfunctional outsiders since his days infiltrating street-kid culture in LA and Portland. Lately, he’s abandoned Hollywood for experimental improv (Last Days, Elephant, Paranoid Park): “I always want to go back to the days of Mala Noche, when I had three people on the crew. I haven’t gotten there yet.”
Picture perfect Drugstore Cowboy. An irreverent ride into junkie hell.

86 Lars Von Trier
The great dane
“I don’t want to scare the audience away a little; I want to scare them away totally.” You’d expect nothing else from the Danish auteur, a 50-year-old enfant terrible who has made it his mission to provoke and unsettle. From the stylistic audacity of Europa and the intensity of Dancer In The Dark to Dogville’s stark austerity, his best work is characterised by a willingness to experiment. He’s not about to mellow, either – brace yourself for his upcoming effort, office comedy The Boss Of It All.
Picture perfect Breaking The Waves. Soul-raking cinema

85 John Woo
The shootist
As a kid, John Woo used to sneak into Hong Kong movie theatres to watch American musicals (“Gene Kelly was so beautiful”). Years later he put his misspent youth to good use directing “heroic bloodshed” movies (A Better Tomorrow, Hard-Boiled): “When I do action, I’m choreographing a dance sequence”. The jump to Hollywood (Broken Arrow, Mission: Impossible II) kept the ballet but lost Woo’s unabashedly Christian interest in redemption. Kitsch classic Face/Off is the closest America’s come to doing it Woo’s way.
Picture perfect The Killer. Bang on target…

84 Carl Theodor Dreyer
The spirit within
All 14 of Dreyer’s films bombed commercially. But they can only be described as filmed miracles. Somehow both realist and expressionist, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc turns actress Falconetti’s face into a devastating human landscape. Beyond Vampyr’s mind-melting fear and Day Of Wrath’s witch-hunt horror, Ordet’s clash of religion and faith and Gertrud’s elusive love story approach utter revelation. A meticulous craftsman, Dreyer had a sixth sense for putting the unrealisable on screen.
Picture perfect Ordet. The last word.

83 Wes Anderson
The king of kook
Wes Anderson nearly didn’t stick with the directing lark: “We’d just done a screening for Bottle Rocket and about half the audience got up and left. I thought, ‘That’s it. We’re not going to do anything better than this.’ Fortunately for us he stuck with it, going on to lovingly sculpt such precious, precocious gems as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Offbeat and sure to catch you off-guard, his films deliver formal beauty, poised characters and – here’s the kicker – genuine emotion.
Picture perfect Love and lunacy in Rushmore.

82 James Whale
The god of monsters
This Dudley-born son of a blast-furnace-man was haunted by memories of World War I. But he found his calling there, too, staging theatre as a POW. Postwar, the ex-cartoonist acted in theatre and moved into dialogue-doctoring for Howard Hughes. Monsters made him: Frankenstein and The Bride Of… are legendary for their outsider empathy, grandeur, pathos and cinematic take on theatricality. But as David Thomson says, this aesthete was “never at ease in Hollywood” and retired in ’41 after a brief but glorious career.
Picture perfect The Bride Of Frankenstein. Gothic grandiosity.

81 Cameron Crowe
The heartbreak kid
“Sugar-coat that bitter little pill.” That’s Cameron Crowe’s piece of wisdom from his own personal movie guru, Billy Wilder. And while Crowe has been accused of over-sweetening his output, there’s always more to his films if you dig a little deeper. From the jarring look at high school life he wrote for Fast Times At Ridgemont High to the pain of the outsider in Say Anything… to the slow destruction of Tom Cruise’s playboy in Vanilla Sky, Crowe’s output burns with real emotion and gut-wrenching truth.
Picture perfect Jerry Maguire. Romcom with smarts and sentiment.

80 Satyajit Ray
The auteur
Satyajit Ray scripted, cast, directed, scored and produced almost all his films – he even operated the camera and designed the posters. His debut, Pather Panchali, captured Bengali village life in lyrical detail and single-handedly put Indian cinema on the world map. Ray’s world encompasses teasing Mozartian complexity (Days And Nights In The Forest) and gamey Dickensian satire (The Middleman), but it’s his artist’s eye and composer’s sense of rhythm that lend grace to his work.
Picture perfect The Lonely Wife. Female sensuality at its subtlest.

79 George Romero
The zombie king
The don of the dead got into horror (and trouble) early, irking Bronx cops when he tossed a burning mannequin off a rooftop for 8mm home-movie The Man From The Meteor. Adulthood brought advertising work until Night Of The Living Dead merged scares and social comment (“I think horror is best when it has some sort of underpinning”). Attempts to ditch the dead were sometimes inspired (vampire flick Martin) but mostly lame (The Dark Half, Bruiser)… until Land Of The Dead brought studio cash and a return to form.
Picture perfect Dawn Of The Dead. Shop till you drop.

78 Oliver Stone
The big man
Bullish, brattish, bothersome: Oliver Stone’s always been a thorn in Hollywood’s side, a moviemaker who tackles Big Issues but is too big a beast to ever be tamed. Channelling the ’60s, he spoke for a generation (Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July, The Doors) until paranoia confused the politics (JFK, Nixon). Convinced of his greatness but losing his touch, he fell hard (Heaven And Earth, Alexander) then delivered World Trade Center, a Bush-friendly tearjerker that stopped believing the truth was out there. Don’t write him off yet, though…
Picture perfect Platoon. Wham, bam thank you ’Nam.

77 William Friedkin
The head-turner
A raging bull turned easy rider, Friedkin bagged Oscars – and changed cinema – with double whammy The French Connection and The Exorcist. Entry into the ’70s elite of Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg soured when Sorcerer, an expensive remake of The Wages Of Fear, went against Luke Skywalker at the box office and flopped. “Star Wars swept all the chips off the table,” he sighed. On the ropes ever since, he’s taken what work he can get: Jade, Rules Of Engagement and the odd opera production. Don’t rule out a comeback though.
Picture perfect The Exorcist. The devil’s own.

76 Kenji Mizoguchi
The ladies man
The cinematic magician oft-forgotten between the twin shadows of Kurosawa and Ozu, Mizoguchi is harder to see and more thrilling to discover. Combining aching sympathy with sliding camerawork and emotional expressionism, Mizoguchi shuns close-ups and cuts to pursue his characters and stories in sinuous, captivating takes. In the tragic spiral of oppressed women in Diary of Oharu (1952), supernatural romance of Ugetsu Monogatri (1953) and heart-shattering parable Sansho Dayu (1954), he finds beauty in suffering.
Picture perfect Ugetsu Monogatari. Ghostly beauty.

75 Milos Forman
The rebel
Having lost his parents to the Nazis and his country to the Soviets, it’s no surprise Forman’s best work has involved charismatic individuals taking on draconian forces. And while the wry humanism of his early Czech movies has been supplanted by bloated spectacle (Goya’s Ghosts, anyone?), his knack for offbeat biopics (Amadeus, Man On The Moon) points to an iconoclastic streak that ensures he’s always found just left of the mainstream. As he says himself, “who doesn’t have sympathy for the underdog?”
Picture perfect One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Rebel yell.

74 Tony Scott
The ad-man on fire
Want unabashed brash and flash? Then you’ve come to the right Scott brother. “[Ridley’s] subject matter is aimed more towards posterity… I tend to be a little more rock ‘n’ roll,” says the man who swam raging rapids to win the directing gig on Top Gun (the first in a string of guilty-pleasure Bruck-busters). His TV-ad-trained need for speed, jagged edits and colour filters can let style overtake story in films like Beverly Hills Cop II and Domino. But his commercial instincts were spot on when he ironed Tarantino’s True Romance script into a high-sheen crowd-charmer.
Picture perfect The Last Boy Scout. (Wise)cracking heads.

73 Nicolas Roeg
The jigsaw man
“There are these three lovely critical expressions,” noted Nic Roeg. “Pretentious, gratuitous and profound… none of which I truly understand.” But he’s familiar with all three, having had critics apply them to his stunning decade-long run of Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Bad Timing. Later films generated less heat (although Castaway created, ahem, some waves) but his cut-up approach to narrative, smart cinematography and provocative motifs combined to produce emotional punch.
Picture perfect Don’t Look Now: ambitious, complex and haunting.

72 Sergei Eisenstein
The propagandist
Not to be confused with the father of relativity, but no less important in cinematic terms. Eisenstein wrote the editing rulebook from scratch in the ’20s, pioneering the use of montage in “arranging images and feelings in the mind of the spectator”. Art quickly fell into the service of propaganda; his Bolshevik trilogy (Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, Ten Days That Shook The World) retelling the Russian revolution for the masses. Falling out of favour with Stalin in the ’30s, his Ivan The Terrible trilogy went unfinished as bureaucracy and age took its toll.
Picture perfect Battleship Potemkin. Revolutionary cinema.

71 John Sayles
The truthsayer
“I’ve started marginal and I’ve stayed marginal”, says writer-director John Sayles. Yet ever since his low-budget debut The Return Of the Secaucus 7 in 1980, he has proved to be one of the most prolific and diverse American independent filmmakers. Subverting traditional genres, Sayles invests his films with a vivid sense of time and place, whether it’s the 1920s West Virginia coalfields in Matewan or an Alaskan fishing community for Limbo. By fusing personal and political, he examines how the past impacts on characters’ lives.
Picture perfect Tex-Mex Western Lone Star. Forget the Alamo.

70 Michael Curtiz
The craftsman
The Hungarian’s command of English wasn’t the best (his Charge Of The Light Brigade order for more bareback gee-gees mocked in the title of David Niven’s memoir Bring On The Empty Horses) but no-one questioned his film savvy. The intense director mastered biography, western, drama and comedy, and made Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Adventures Of Robin Hood and Jimmy Cagney gangster flick Angels With Dirty Faces. Other Golden Age directors bowed to the needs of their studio – Curtiz remade Warner Bros’ output in his own image.
Picture perfect Casablanca. You must remember this.

69 Alexander Mackendrick
The subversive
Mackendrick slipped his mordant Scots humour into the snug world of Ealing comedy like a razor-blade into a tea-cake. In Whisky Galore!, principled Captain Waggett is gulled by cynical islanders; Sidney Stratton, The Man In The White Suit, is hunted by a lynch-mob of bosses and workers; the crooks of The Ladykillers are driven to self-destruction by an unbending nanny. “It’s that hidden element of the intolerable in comedy,” observes Mackendrick, “that separates it from triviality.” Alone of his stablemates, he made a post-Ealing masterpiece…
Picture perfect …Sweet Smell of Success. Ruthless New York noir.

68 Pedro Almodóvar
The provocateur
The high-camp mischief-maker cobbled together Super 8 shorts in Madrid in the early ’70s, below the radar of the oppressive Franco regime. “My rebellion is to deny Franco,” he said later, once his screwball sex comedies, including Matador and Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, had made him an arthouse darling. He has completed the journey from irreverent imp to classy crowd-pleaser with glossy, gratifying pictures like Talk To Her and Volver.
Picture perfect All About My Mother. A chick-flick with a kick.

67 Federico Fellini
The ringmaster
Late Fellini, packed with dwarves, gargantuan women and circus trickery, is a byword for self-indulgence. Earlier Fellini’s neorealist roots had meshed with his personal obsessions, reining in the visual excess. I, Vitelloni examines provincial futility, La Strada and Il Bidone mix satire with compassion, Nights Of Cabiria showcases Giulietta Masina’s deluded Roman hooker. La Dolce Vita is the tipping-point, Fellini at once fascinated and repelled by decadent spectacle. From then on it’s downhill. “I’ve nothing to say,” admits the director’s surrogate in 81⁄2, “but I want to say it anyway.”
Picture perfect La Dolce Vita. Excess all areas…

66 Ken Loach
The social realist
“We are all equally important and drama is not the preserve of the middle class,” says Loach, who for over four decades has demonstrated an indefatigable commitment to exploring the lives of society’s have-nots. His best films, such as Raining Stones, My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen, blend humour with pathos and feature impressively naturalistic performances. Last year’s elegiac Irish civil war epic The Wind That Shakes The Barley deservedly won the Palme d’Or, but for socialist Loach the struggle continues.
Picture perfect Kes. A boy and his hawk.

65 Bryan Singer
The new Spielberg
It’s no surprise to learn Singer’s favourite movie is Jaws. A film school grad born too late to join the ’70s movie brats, Singer followed Spielberg’s path, making polished blockbusters for Generation Xbox. Labyrinthine classic The Usual Suspects paved the way, but then came a career shift into comic book adaptations (X-Men I and II, Superman Returns). No geeky fanboy, Singer turned each into something personal; his status as one of Hollywood’s few openly gay directors making him no stranger to alienation.
Picture perfect The Usual Suspects, unusually complex.

64 Richard Linklater
The chameleon
It’s ironic that Linklater made his name with a film called Slacker. The self-taught writer-director has never rested on his laurels, switching genres (western, sci-fi, baseball flick) and formats (16mm, digital, animation) with ease. No one yelled “sell out!” when the indie stalwart went mainstream with School Of Rock, which, like Before Sunrise/Sunset and Dazed And Confused, highlights his gift for warmth sans schmaltz. He can do downbeat, too: Tape, SubUrbia and A Scanner Darkly, the last of these nailing Philip K Dick’s voice through his own.
Picture perfect Dazed And Confused. School of rock ‘n’ roll.

63 John Carpenter
The prince of darkness
Handed an 8mm camera aged eight, John Carpenter found himself driven by “an unnatural obsession” to make movies. Debut featurette Revenge Of The Colossal Beasts set his stall out early; his craft, if not his taste, was improved by attending USC to be tutored by Ford, Hawks and Welles. A pragmatic guy, Carpenter cranked out A-grade B-movies in the ’70s and early ’80s: Dark Star, Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, The Thing. Masterful and menacing, they negate 20 years of subsequent mediocrity.
Picture perfect Halloween. Minimum gore, maximum terror.

62 Robert Bresson
The patron saint
“Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music,” said Jean-Luc Godard. Catholic humanist Bresson made just 14 films in 40 years, all astonishing dramas of grace and redemption in a cruel, cold world. In Pickpocket’s crime drama and POW thriller A Man Escaped, he created a kind of pure cinema – non-actors, no superfluous details, seismic close-ups. And how many geniuses choose a donkey as their great witness? Poor old Balthazar (Au Hasard Balthazar) sees it all: envy, pride, brutality and… love.
Picture perfect Pickpocket. The hand of God.

61 Sam Raimi
The geek
Aged 19, Sam Raimi took $300,000 raised from Michigan doctors and dentists and made Within The Woods, which turned into The Evil Dead, a horror classic that had Stephen King raving and the Obscene Publications Act ranting. After a decade of horror (Evil Dead 2, Army Of Darkness, Darkman), Sharon Stone picked him for spaghetti western The Quick And The Dead and, in 2002, Spider-Man slung him on to the A-list. Always polite, he directs in suit and tie: “The old masters used to dress in a formal manner on set,” he notes. “I thought it was supercool.”
Picture perfect Splatstick horror-com Evil Dead 2.

60 John Cassavetes
The independent
“We only have two hours to change people’s lives.” A mercurial actor who decided Hollywood had it all wrong, John Cassavetes picked up the camera and did it his way, becoming a figure-head for independent film with Shadows in 1959. He dug out emotional truths through raw, documentary-style camerawork and intense collaboration with actors. A dozen searingly personal, tumultuous, sometimes deliberately aggravating movies followed, including Faces, Husbands, Gloria and Love Streams.
Picture perfect A Woman Under The Influence. Indelible emotion.

59 Jean-Luc Godard
The terrorist
“We all wanted to be Jean-Luc Godard,” recalls Bernardo Bertolucci. You sympathise. A Bout De Souffle broke the mould in 1959, grafting Left Bank nihilism and celluloid savvy onto the gangster flick. Twenty features in 10 years followed, the ex-Cahiers du cinéma critic making another cine-literate, politically nuanced masterpiece whenever he stepped near a camera (Le Petit Soldat, Le Mépris, Week- End). The late-’60s began a detour into ideological navel-gazing he still hasn’t bounced back from, forgetting his maxim: “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”
Picture perfect À Bout De Souffle. Celluloid cool.

58 Hal Ashby
The outsider
Ashby’s career began in the printing room at Republic Studios, finding success as an Oscar-winning editor for Norman Jewison. His own movies – The Last Detail, Coming Home, Shampoo, Harold And Maude, Being There – are rich, textured entertainments. “There’s a real sweetness [and] compassion in his work,” says Alexander Payne, who has publicly acknowledged his debt to Ashby. Perhaps the most overlooked ’70s filmmaker, he’s remembered as much for his drugs, hippie hair and premature death (in 1988, aged 69) as his sensitive, sensual movies.
Picture perfect Harold And Maude. Friendship and funerals.

57 Spike Lee
The firebrand
“Straight up and down, film work is hard shit.” Not that Spike Lee makes it any easier for himself, fearlessly tackling issues of race, gender and social inequality with a fervour that’s almost scary. Having burned most of his bridges with Malcolm X, the 49-year-old firebrand has found it tough in recent years to escape the restricting Afro-American ghetto from which he emerged. For every foray into the mainstream, though, there is one from the heart – a dichotomy reflected this year by Inside Man’s sister project, angry Hurricane Katrina doc When The Levees Broke.
Picture perfect Do The Right Thing. Fight the Power.

56 Nicholas Ray
The romantic pessimist
In the late ’40s and ’50s, this maverick Hollywood auteur made films about misfits, outsiders and dreamers, alienated from US society: doomed lovers-on-the-run in They Live By Night; James Dean’s troubled teenager in Rebel Without A Cause; rodeo riders in the elegiac The Lusty Men; warring gunslingers in Johnny Guitar. Ray’s expressionistic visuals memorably convey the inner torment of his characters. As Godard declared, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.”
Picture perfect Bigger Than Life. The American Dream becomes a nightmare.

55 John Huston
The big man
For a man who once shrugged “I don’t try to guess what a million people will like – it’s hard enough to know what I like”, 10- time Oscar nominee John Huston made a slew of crowd-pleasers: The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Key Largo, The Man Who Would Be King... A man’s man who loved to drink, hunt, fuck, box and gamble, he was also an ardent supporter of human rights and a painter. No wonder his multilayered movies reward repeated viewings.
Picture perfect The Maltese Falcon. The stuff that dreams are made of.

54 Brian De Palma
The sensationalist
Dismissed by many as a flashy director of sex and violence (Carrie, Obsession, The Fury, Dressed To Kill, Body Double), De Palma likes blondes, split screens and elaborate Steadicam shots (“I’m a visual stylist,” he shrugs). But the man who gave De Niro his break in Greetings has made some cracking mainstream movies (The Untouchables, Carlito’s Way, Mission: Impossible) and was a key member of the Movie Brats — it’s said he gave Scorsese the script for Taxi Driver and helped pen the “A long time ago ...” bit for Star Wars. That’ll do.
Picture perfect Scarface. Iconic and massively influential.

53 Don Siegel
The journeyman
Best known now as Clint Eastwood’s mentor, the Chicago-born, Cambridge-educated director honed his no-nonsense technique in films that were B-movies only in name. The brusque sensibility that informed Riot In Cell Block 11 and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers proved no less adept when he stepped up a division, his collaborations with Eastwood producing some of the leanest, meanest thrillers of the ’70s. “Don was a real pro,” said the actor admiringly. “He did what a director should do, which is to make decisions and stand by those decisions for better or worse.”
Picture perfect Dirty Harry. Number one with a bullet.

52 Michael Haneke
The provocateur
“You feel very disturbed and in order to free yourself from these feelings you’re forced to engage with the film’s ideas.” Haneke’s cinema jolts like a stun gun, the Austrian auteur shocking arthouse audiences out of their comfort zone. Confrontational trilogy The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, Funny Games seeks “to make people more aware of their role as consumers in screen violence”. Code Unknown and Hidden changed gears, probing European racism and social apocalypse with glacial, academic detachment.
Picture perfect Hidden. Hides nothing, exposes everything.

51 Robert Wise
The jack of all genres
“I learned on the job. The film schools weren’t even going back then.” Robert Wise didn’t have a formal education but he started out with the best. Editing Citizen Kane, anyone? Offered a shot at directing, Wise took it, birthing a career littered with extraordinary movies: The Set-Up, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, West Side Story, The Sound Of Music... Often overlooked because he’s an anti-auteur (it’s hard to discern thematic fingerprints on his genre-hopping movies), there’s no denying his craft or storytelling.
Picture perfect The Curse Of The Cat People. Magical, unsettling, unique.

Click here to read the Top 50!