Malick’s case is incredibly strong for a relatively modern auteur.  He is certainly having a puzzling decade by first giving us perhaps his best career work- and then falling on his face with a weaker trilogy (though I must admit I’m very excited to revisit). When I did my top 500 I had Days of Heaven at #47 and The Thing Red Line at #43. They aren’t going anywhere. I like to have a 10 year moratorium on new films before I canonize them and add them to my top 500–  but in this case with The Tree off Life– I can’t deny

Eisenstein. I don’t have a ton of Eisenstein films in the archives but they all have fantastic grades (and 5 in the top 500) and certainly he warrants the distinction of “style-plus” direction.  It’s more than that really- it’s a complete dedication to an aesthetic. Eisenstein is the master of the montage style- film art made in the editing room- and the Odessa Steps scene in Potemkin in particular is an all-time genuine stylistic landmark. Griffith may be the father of parallel editing and others are fantastic editors (from Leone, to Truffaut, to Stone, Nolan, Malick and Francis Coppola) but

Kar-Wai Wong. For the purposes of this list his strengths are his two giant masterpieces and the fact that he is certainly a “style-plus” director.  It’s hard to think of an auteur that is more of a “style-plus” director actually which would support the argument that Kar-Wai Wong belongs in the top 5 or 10 on this list and not 22nd . On the other hand, his filmography doesn’t warrant top 5-10 ranking and frankly doesn’t quite match even some of those behind him on this list. Almost nobody though has a film to touch In the mood for Love.

Lang. Lang is an early master- he gave us the 4th best film of the 1920s and 3rd best of the 1930s- that’s remarkable. I think I looked past Lang initially because he doesn’t have the big third film after Metropolis and M. I’ve concluded, at least for the time being, that the body of the rest of his work (total of 22 archiveable films), particularly his brilliant work in film noir (and the partial bringing about of that entire genre), was enough for this slot and act as a surrogate third masterpiece. Unlike many of the other great silent directors, I

Leone. There are no easy choices on this list/project. By and large, I think much more of all 3 Leone/Eastwood collaborations than the TSPDT critical consensus. Also, I view Leone’s style as a huge plus (i.e. I think he, as a stylist, is even stronger than his filmography which as I’ve said on this project isn’t always the case). Like many on this list (and coming after) I wish Leone had made more films but damn his top 5 is really strong and they compare favorably with nearly any director’s top 5 (especially when you get away from the

Dreyer. The strength of Dreyer’s case is not in his production quantity but quality.  Oddly enough, Dreyer only one archiveable film a decade for 5 straight decades from the 20’s to 60’s- wild. I’ve seen some of his work prior to The Passion of Joan of Arc—Master of the House from 1925---not great—but from 1928 to his death 40 years later in 1968 Dreyer made only 6 feature films (his disowned 1945’s Tva Manniskor and I don’t know of anyone that’s ever seen it) and 5 of those are MP, MS, MS, MS, MP. His first and final films

Lynch. David Lynch’s case is really strong. Lynch has made ten (10) features- I have nine of the ten films in my archives. I’ve given Dune a few chances and probably have another one left in me but it’s pretty bad. His filmography ranks him 22nd overall and he's a style-plus director. He creates his own cinematic world- surrealism- a nightmare of a world. He’s wildly stylish and concerned with reoccurring imagery (both in-film and throughout his oeuvre) which plays so well formally. There’s still potential upside with me even if Lynch never creates anything else worthy of the archives.

Ophüls. During 2011 and 2012 I saw all of Ophüls’ available films (his early pre ww2 German films are largely unavailable or lost). After leaving his homeland (Germany) he made a few films in Hollywood like Lang and other German defectors and then from 50-55 (just before he died, at age 55) made 4 films in a 6 year period in France- those films are MS, MP, MP, and MP.  Sadly, he died with two top 100 all-time films as the last two films on his resume. I think he was the best director in the world during this

Godard. I feel like I’ve written so much about Godard over the years. I’ll be the first to grant that if you consider documentaries and experimental cinema alongside narrative fiction cinema, then Godard would probably be closer to a top 5 auteur. I don’t…. so he isn’t. All of my top 10 films of Godard are from his 60’s period. From 1960-1967 Godard went on an incredible run both with big masterpieces (Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, Contempt) and high productivity (10 archiveable films in 8 years). It’s reminiscent of Coppola’s run from 1972-79 with 4 masterpieces (3 of them

Paul Thomas Anderson. Anderson’s four films in the top 100 (work from 2009 or newer not yet eligible) puts him tied with Welles for second place behind only Kubrick (5) and that’s his case—and what a case. Sarris (after Boogie Nights) “Not since the mysteriously reclusive Terrence Malick has there been such an explosion of sheer talent on the American movie.”  There are only two living directors ahead of PT right now on my all-time director’s list and that’s Scorsese and Coppola and those two giants are 28 and 32 years older respectively—this basically means Anderson is peerless in

Renoir. Renoir dominated the 1930’s making 7 of the top 100 of the decade and a whopping 5 of the top 18 films. 14 total archiveable films is very respectable (I need to rewatch half of them as it’s been a decade or more) and we have 2 films in the top 100 (Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game). I’ll get to it more below in style but he’s one of the fathers of camera movement—taking up the mantle or baton toss if you will almost directly from Murnau who passed away in 1931—the same year of

Truffaut. No French in the top 10? Blasphemy, right to a country with such a rich tradition in cinema? I know. I’m actually more bullish on Truffaut than most cinephiles. Playful and largely accessible- he’s very different from like Kubrick, Bergman and Tarkovsky.  He arrived on the scene with three big masterpieces, gave us the first masterpiece of the French New Wave (as an important a movement as any in film history), basically invented the freeze frame (from his mentor and hero Hitchcock but it was not alive in 1959), gave us the closest thing to “catcher in the