The 100 Best And Most Exciting Directors Working Today

90. Carlos Reygadas
Over the course of the decade 2002-2012, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas amassed his complete feature filmography to date with “Japon,” “Silent Light,” “Battle in Heaven” and “Post Tenebras Lux” — an oeuvre unlikely to ever be dubbed “a barrel of laughs.” But challenging and frustrating though Reygadas undoubtedly is, with his deeply indulgent forays into the arcane, existentialist interior lives of his dissociated, despondent characters, his films are also very often transcendent, operating less in the realm of narrative filmmaking than art installation. His most recent and most divisive, the semi-autobiographical “Post Tenebras Lux” is probably his most difficult, but potentially also his most rewarding, coupling unforgettably bizarre imagery with troubling, morose, ontological themes. It won Best Director in Cannes, quite deservedly if only because Reygadas is probably the poster boy for a director whose work can simultaneously be impossible for an outsider to decode and an an eloquently uncompromised iteration of exactly what he wants to say.

89. Abdellatif Kechiche
Until a certain unprecedented treble-Palme d’Or win in 2013, it might have seemed like Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche had already made his masterpiece and it was his third film, the beautifully human (if terribly titled) “The Secret of the Grain.” Indeed, he followed it with “Black Venus,” a controversially unflinching true story of period racism, and so no one was really prepared for “Blue is the Warmest Color” to be the sublime and transcendent work of unimpeachable empathy that it is. This beautiful evocation of a love affair from first trembling beginning to slow, heart-aching end featured stunning performances from Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, to whom Steven Spielberg‘s Cannes jury also awarded Palmes in an attempt to recognize them as co-authors of the film. Although critiqued in lesbian circles, especially for one overlong sex scene, the Kechiche’s film largely transcends sexuality, and even transcends the public rift between director and stars that sullied its success at the time.

88. Amma Asante
We think the reason that Amma Asante doesn’t get more critical attention is that the kind of films that she makes are rather unfashionable. Her debut, 2004’s powerful kitchen sink drama “A Way Of Life” won her a BAFTA, but was barely seen outside of the U.K. When she came back, after a long gap, it was with “Belle,” a British period melodrama, a genre mostly dismissed as the stuff of Tom Hooper or Masterpiece Theater. But “Belle” was no ordinary costume drama — thoughtfully shot and beautifully performed, it told the story of a mixed-race aristocratic woman in 18th century Britain, at once subverting and celebrating the genre while finding truly smart and specific things to say about identity. By most accounts from TIFF, Asante’s “A United Kingdom” is a fitting follow-up, bringing the same qualities to the story of Botswana’s first democratically-elected leader and his English wife, and she’ll soon complete an unofficial trilogy of films mixing period romance with race with “Where Hands Touch,” set in WW2-era Germany.

87. Phil Lord & Chris Miller
Lord & Miller have made a career out of taking what seem like bad, cynical ideas, and turning them into joyous, fantastically made, quietly progressive comedy hits. A virtually narrative-free children’s picture book about it raining food (feature debut “Cloudy With Chance Of Meatballs”)? No problem. A hokey 80s TV show about cops going undercover in high school (“21 Jump Street” and “22 Jump Street”)? Easy, not once but twice. Danish plastic bricks (“The Lego Movie”)? Don’t sweat it. The duo, who got their start with short lived MTV animation “Clone High,” are fiercely intelligent and deeply silly, as comfortable with blending a dozen pop culture properties without even feeling like it’s corporate synergy as they are with burning down their franchise in the closing credits. Inventive, visually proficient and plain hilarious, there aren’t many people we’d trust to do a good job with a Han Solo-centric “Star Wars” prequel, but with Lord & Miller in charge, we can’t wait.

86. Andrei Zvyagintsev
One of the most precise directors on this list, clinical to the point of surgical in his incisive and excoriating investigations into contemporary Russian society, Andrei Zvyaginstev is still not as well-known a name stateside as his exceptional filmography deserves. From his debut, the chilling parable of parental abandonment “The Return” which won the Golden Lion in Venice, to brilliant Cannes 2012 Special Jury Prize winer “Elena,” to near-masterpiece political allegory “Leviathan” which won him the Best Screenplay award in Cannes 2014, Zvyaginstev has been a consistently powerful voice in Russian cinema, writing and directing tales that lay bare the hypocrisies and injustices of his homeland, often disguised as much more intimate stories. 2007’s “The Banishment” has been perhaps his only stumble to date, but otherwise, a pessimistic Chabrol by way of a scathing Chekov, Zvyaginstev takes the “gloomy Russian” stereotype and raises it to a completely engrossing and thoroughly fascinating art form.

85. Rebecca Miller
After five films, Rebecca Miller remains puzzlingly underrated as a filmmaker, given the real and obvious skill she’s displayed since day one. Miller (who is, yes, the daughter of “The Crucible” playwright Arthur Miller) made her debut with the dark, religious-themed horror “Angela” in 1995, but got more attention for the 2002 triptych “Personal Velocity” and 2009’s undervalued “The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee,” both based on her novels (“The Ballad Of Jack & Rose,” which teamed her with husband Daniel Day-Lewis, was a rare misfire). But something of a mainstream breakthrough came this year with the lighter, rather delightful relationship comedy “Maggie’s Plan.” Together, they show a filmmaker with a real facility for working with performers, and rarer still for writing great roles for women. And it’s the new, more comic side of Miller shown in her last film that has us most excited for what she might come up with in the future.

84. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
We have to confess that we don’t have the patience for all the slow cinema filmmakers, but Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one that we’ll always make an exception for. The Turkish filmmaker made his debut with “Small Town” back in 1998, and swiftly came to the attention of international cinephiles when 2002’s “Uzak” took the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Since then, he’s not put a foot wrong, be it slow-burn relationship drama “Climates,” morality play “Three Monkeys” or his Chekhovian epic “Winter Sleep,” which won him the Palme D’Or in 2014. Our favorite of his is 2011’s “Once Upon A Time In Anatolia,” which blends the arthouse and the police procedural in a fascinating way, using Ceylan’s meticulous, careful style to bring real weight and power to its story of the unknowability of the truth. Ceylan asks you to invest a lot of time and energy, but you’ll always leave thoroughly satisfied.

83. Kim Jee-woon
South Korea should probably declare visionary genre filmmakers to be their biggest export after semiconductors, but one of this wave whose name is a little less well-known is Kim Jee-woon, though he deserves to win a wider audience with this year’s terrific spy caper “The Age of Shadows.” Prior to that title, Kim Jee-woon has been an inveterate genre-hopper and has turned in a classic in many — from the unfeasibly scary horror “A Tale of Two Sisters,” to the ultra violent gangster flick “A Bittersweet Life,” to the bizarro Korean take on the Spaghetti Western “The Good, The Bad, The Weird” to the dark, psychological serial killer-thriller “I Saw The Devil.” In fact the only hiccup in this remarkable run is his disappointingly bland English-language debut “The Last Stand,” but with ‘Shadows’ showing him back on home turf and on top form, we can see that Arnie-starrer for the aberration it was.

82. Olivier Assayas
Had we liked Olivier Assayas’ last couple of movies a bit more, we might have placed him further up this list — despite good performances (his latest muse Kristen Stewart is doing the best work of her career with him), we found both “Clouds Of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper” kind of tin-eared and oblique. But even with those two caveats, Assayas is undoubtedly one of the leading lights of French cinema, a filmmaker with truly great work behind him and, we’re sure, great work still to come too. As cine-literate a filmmaker as you could ask for, he can make a film as deeply human as the gorgeous “Summer Hours,” as muscular and gripping as his epic “Carlos,” as pulpy as “Boarding Gate” or as purely strange as “Demonlover,” And each one will be as stylistically and intellectually stimulating as the last. We’ll happily take a couple of recent misfires for a career like his.

81. Joanna Hogg
With a long background on television, it might have been inevitable that British director Joanna Hogg would finally make the shift to the big screen. But the surprise was just how fully-formed her personal vision and aesthetic was from the off — in her debut film “Unrelated” she revealed her trademark long static takes, and her ability to bore down into the reality of a deeply middle-class British experience so unflinchingly that at times it becomes almost surreal. “Unrelated” starred Tom Hiddleston, with whom she reteamed for her second film “Archipelago” which, like her first minutely examined fracturing family dynamics during a holiday, but to dramatically different effect. And while we weren’t so keen on “Exhibition,” Hogg’s third film which felt simply too opaque and rarefied to gain real purchase on, as an example of a dedicated, unique artist testing her limits, it makes us very much anticipate her next foray.