View Larger Image The 250 Best Directors of All-Time 1. Alfred Hitchcock 2. Stanley Kubrick 3. Ingmar Bergman 4. Yasujirô Ozu 5. Federico Fellini 6. Martin Scorsese 7. Francis Ford Coppola 8. Andrei Tarkovsky 9. Orson Welles 10. John Ford 11. Michelangelo Antonioni 12. Akira Kurosawa 13. François Truffaut 14. Jean Renoir 15. Paul Thomas Anderson 16. Jean-Luc Godard 17. Max Ophüls 18. David Lynch 19. Carl Theodor Dreyer 20. Sergio Leone 21. Fritz Lang 22. Kar-Wai Wong 23. Sergei Eisenstein 24. Terrence Malick 25. F.W. Murnau 26. Joseph von Sternberg 27. Woody Allen 28. Steven Spielberg 29. Howard Hawks 30. The Coen Brothers 31. Luis Bunuel 32. Roberto Rossellini 33. David Lean 34. Robert Altman 35. Michael Powell 36. David Cronenberg 37. Jim Jarmusch 38. Roman Polanski 39. Billy Wilder 40.Vittorio De Sica 41. David Fincher 42. Krzysztof Kieslowski 43. Spike Lee 44. Quentin Tarantino 45. Satyajit Ray 46. Mikhail Kalatozov 47. D.W. Griffith 48. Werner Herzog 49. Shôhei Imamura 50. Nicolas Roeg 51. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 52. Bernardo Bertolucci 53. Michael Mann 54. Luchino Visconti 55. Ridley Scott 56. Kenji Mizoguchi 57. Douglas Sirk 58. Sam Peckinpah 59. Peter Greenaway 60. Alfonso Cuarón 61. Lars von Trier 62. Robert Bresson 63. Agnes Varda 64. Brian De Palma 65. Wes Anderson 66. Jean-Pierre Melville 67. Jacques Tati 68. Terry Gilliam 69. Jacques Demy 70. Bela Tarr 71. Sidney Lumet 72. Michael Haneke 73. Buster Keaton 74. Alan Pakula 75. Erich von Stroheim 76. John Cassavetes 77. Nicholas Ray 78. James Cameron 79. Clint Eastwood 80. Charlie Chaplin 81. Sofia Coppola 82. Frank Capra 83. The Dardenne Brothers 84. George Cukor 85. Otto Preminger 86. Richard Linklater 87. Steven Soderbergh 88. William Wyler 89. Oliver Stone 90. Darren Aronofsky 91. Wim Wenders 92. Yimou Zhang 93. Preston Sturges 94. Jonathan Demme 95. Pedro Almodovar 96. Mike Nichols 97. Vincente Minnelli 98. Ernst Lubitsch 99. Hayao Miyazaki 100. John Carpenter 101. Apichatpong Weerasethakul 102. John Huston 103. Bob Fosse 104. Raoul Walsh 105. Alejandro G. Iñárritu 106. G.W. Pabst 107. Milos Forman 108. William Friedkin 109. Christopher Nolan 110. Elia Kazan 111. Hsiao-Hsien Hou 112. Michael Curtiz 113. Dario Argento 114. Samuel Fuller 115. Peter Jackson 116. James Whale 117. King Vidor 118. Carol Reed 119. Victor Fleming 120. Robert Zemeckis 121. George Lucas 122. Guillermo del Toro 123. Jacques Tourneur 124. Arthur Penn 125. Louis Malle 126. George Stevens 127. René Clair 128. Anthony Minghella 129. Stanley Donen 130. Michael Cimino 131. George Romero 132. Marcel Carné 133. Pier Paolo Pasolini 134. Paul Schrader 135. Sam Mendes 136. Gus Van Sant 137. Abbas Kiarostami 138. Terence Davies 139. Tod Browning 140. Mike Leigh 141. Hal Ashby 142. Alain Resnais 143. Todd Haynes 144. Lynne Ramsay 145. Joseph Mankiewicz 146. George Miller 147. Eric Rohmer 148. Jane Campion 149. Jules Dassin 150. Robert Wise 151. Joe Wright 152. John Schlesinger 153. Ken Loach 154. Cecil B. DeMille 155. Jean Cocteau 156. Baz Luhrmann 157. Anthony Mann 158. Jean-Pierre Jeunet 159. Henri-Georges Clouzot 160. Steve McQueen 161. John Frankenheimer 162. John Boorman 163. Mario Bava 164. Alexander Payne 165. John Woo 166. Tim Burton 167. James Ivory 168. Edgar Ulmer 169. James Gray 170. Andrzej Wajda 171. Noah Baumbach 172. Don Siegel 173. Robert Aldrich 174. Frank Borzage 175. Ang Lee 176. Roy Andersson 177. Peter Weir 178. Chang-dong Lee 179. Jean Vigo 180. Spike Jonze 181. Edward Yang 182. John McTiernan 183. Warren Beatty 184. Satoshi Kon 185. Fred Zinnemann 186. Tony Richardson 187. Zhangke Jia 188. Joseph Lewis 189. John Sayles 190. Danny Boyle 191. Cristian Mungiu 192. Peter Bogdanovich 193. Abel Ferrara 194. Robert Rossen 195. Kelly Reichardt 196. Budd Boetticher 197. The Wachowskis’ 198. Aki Kaurismäki 199. Sergio Corbucci 200. Andrew Dominik 201. Nicolas Winding Refn 202. Rouben Mamoulian 203. Pawel Pawlikowski 204. Yorgos Lanthimos 205. Leos Carax 206. Masaki Kobayashi 207. Alejandro Jodorowsky 208. David O. Russell 209. John Sturges 210. René Clément 211. Gaspar Noé 212. Damien Chazelle 213. Paul Greengrass 214. Barry Levinson 215. Ari Aster 216. László Nemes 217. Bong Joon Ho 218. Sydney Pollack 219. Denis Villeneuve 220. Chan-wook Park 221. Barry Jenkins 222. Paul Verhoeven 223. George Roy Hill 224. The Safdie Brothers 225. Joanna Hogg 226. Paolo Sorrentino 227. Xavier Dolan 228. Ryan Coogler 229. Luca Guadagnino 230. Jack Clayton 231. Lewis Milestone 232. Franklin Schaffner 233. Jonathan Glazer 234. Edgar Wright 235. Carroll Ballard 236. Tom Tykwer 237. Claire Denis 238. Asghar Farhadi 239. Lawrence Kasdan 240. Kathryn Bigelow 241. Rob Reiner 242. Laurence Olivier 243. Trey Edward Shults 244. Greta Gerwig 245. Robert Eggers 246. Derek Cianfrance 247. Tom Hooper 248. Bennett Miller 249. Jeff Nichols 250. Kenneth Lonergan Drake2022-12-18T13:58:11-05:00 Share This Story, Choose Your Platform! FacebookTwitterRedditLinkedInPinterest Related Posts Gallery The Best 1000 Films of All-Time October 17th, 2023 | 670 Comments Gallery The Top 100 Performances by a Male Actor September 10th, 2023 | 112 Comments Gallery The Top 100 Male Actors of All-Time September 2nd, 2023 | 174 Comments Gallery The Best Films of the 2020s so far… June 9th, 2023 | 226 Comments Gallery The Top 100 Performances by a Female Actor March 18th, 2023 | 61 Comments 687 Comments Kzaruqy August 28, 2026 at 4:29 pm - Reply no Masaki Kobayashi is crazy Malith August 28, 2026 at 6:11 pm - Reply @Kzaruqy- Kobayashi is at #206 here. Malith March 24, 2026 at 8:33 am - Reply Terence Fisher should be a contender for this list. Malith February 18, 2026 at 3:39 am - Reply @Drake- Have you seen or archived any Claude Sautet films? Pep Pep July 28, 2026 at 1:35 pm - Reply How is it lonergan is in the top 250 but you don’t have any movie of his in your top 1000? Malith January 31, 2026 at 1:16 am - Reply @Drake- What are the Maurice Pialat films you have in the archives? Drake January 31, 2026 at 9:35 am - Reply @Malith- I think Loulou and Sous le soleil de Satan Malith January 26, 2026 at 1:14 am - Reply @Drake- What are the Derek Jarman films you have in the archives? Drake January 26, 2026 at 7:24 am - Reply @Malith- I saw 10-12 films of Jarman’s between 2016-2022- Caravaggio and War Requiem are in the archives I believe Harry January 24, 2026 at 3:41 pm - Reply Who is the best director who never made anything higher than an R level film? Drake January 24, 2026 at 10:57 pm - Reply @Harry- I’ll let others chime in here – it would be pretty manual to pull that on my side so I don’t have an easy answer. The first name I think of off the top of my head is Ron Howard. Previous 1 … 8 9 10 Leave A Comment Cancel replyComment
no Masaki Kobayashi is crazy
@Kzaruqy- Kobayashi is at #206 here.
Terence Fisher should be a contender for this list.
@Drake- Have you seen or archived any Claude Sautet films?
How is it lonergan is in the top 250 but you don’t have any movie of his in your top 1000?
@Drake- What are the Maurice Pialat films you have in the archives?
@Malith- I think Loulou and Sous le soleil de Satan
@Drake- What are the Derek Jarman films you have in the archives?
@Malith- I saw 10-12 films of Jarman’s between 2016-2022- Caravaggio and War Requiem are in the archives I believe
Who is the best director who never made anything higher than an R level film?
@Harry- I’ll let others chime in here – it would be pretty manual to pull that on my side so I don’t have an easy answer. The first name I think of off the top of my head is Ron Howard.