The 100 Best And Most Exciting Directors Working Today

30. Andrew Dominik
There are those who consider Andrew Dominik’s elegiac anti-western, “The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford” the best film of the new century, and those who are wrong about movies. Ok, fine, just kidding but also not really — after a muted initial reception, it is only recently getting the recognition it always merited. It didn’t quite come out of nowhere: Dominik’s much-less-polished 2000 debut “Chopper” displayed a lot of promise and a career-making turn from Eric Bana; while his third feature, “Killing Them Softly,” didn’t quite attain the heights of his second. But in case we were losing faith, along comes this year’s “One More Time With Feeling,” which may be a music documentary (covering the recording of the new Nick Cave album “Skeleton Tree“) but is also one of the most profoundly moving films of the year, and an immensely inventive and beautiful 3D filmmaking showcase to boot.

29. Lucrecia Martel
Great though 2016 has been for festival programming, it has been a year of serial disappointment in terms of one particular title: Lucrecia Martel’s “Zama.” Now due to bow in 2017, we hope it’s the film that will see the Argentinian director become known to audiences outside the critical circles she’s already conquered, starting with debut “La Ciénaga” back in 2002, building through “The Holy Girl” in 2004, up to 2008’s Cannes title “The Headless Woman.” The last of those really bowled us over (we placed it at 6 on our Best Foreign Language Films of the Century list). An ambiguous, mysterious, yet crisply composed portrait of gradual mental disintegration, that also works as pointed commentary on the class divisions in Argentinian society and the challenges facing women of a certain age, it’s a masterclass in directorial control and deep subjectivity which seems a thrilling counterpoint to the sprawling canvas of the long-gestating adaptation “Zama.”

28. Michael Haneke
The two-time Cannes-winning Austrian master may never have made an out-and-out horror film (indeed, he’s in general disdainfully removed from the very idea of genre), but that doesn’t mean Michael Haneke doesn’t absolutely terrify us. And on occasion, his chilly, austere intellectualism, while never less than diamond-cut in its brilliance, can verge on the scornful as with the deeply didactic “Funny Games,” which often feels less like a lesson than a punishment for the viewer. But most of the time his hardness, his unflinchingly steely edge, his subzero lack of sentimentality simply means his films cut deeper than almost anyone else’s, whether it’s the eerie parable of “The White Ribbon;” the twisted psychosexual drama of “The Piano Teacher;” or the utterly genius, deeply troubling “Hidden,” which lives on long after it ends as a kind of unscratchable itch in the mind. His next film “Happy End” (100% guaranteed to be an ironic title) is due in 2017, which gives us a little time to mentally regroup after having been shredded by his last, the Oscar-winning “Amour.”

27. Lynne Ramsay
For a minute, we were worried that Lynne Ramsay might never make a film again. Three years ago, the director of “Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar” and “We Need To Talk About Kevin” quit Western “Jane Got A Gun” on the eve of production, with producers putting blame for the blow-up squarely on her shoulders. It’s the kind of incident that could have ended a career, but with the film finally arriving in utterly defanged form, it felt like a vindication for Ramsay, and it feels only appropriate that she started shooting a new film this summer. A sort of social/magic realist, Ramsay is a master of sound and vision, weaving a beguiling style whether she’s tackling gritty kitchen-sink coming-of-age as with her debut, an utterly singular travelogue/character study with ‘Callar,’ or a wrenching study of parenting with ‘Kevin.’ Next, she’s going genre, adapting Jonathan Ames’ neo-noir novella “You Were Never Really Here” with Joaquin Phoenix in the lead.

26. Shane Carruth
A century into the medium, it’s rare for a director to produce something that’s truly and completely original in film. So far, Shane Carruth’s done it twice, with two films, very different from each other, but each equally dazzling. Debut “Primer” was made on a shoestring, but was one of the most intellectually stimulating puzzle-boxes ever made, looping its time-travel conceit in on itself over and over and over again and posing some fascinating existential questions along the way. Follow-up “Upstream Color,” nearly a decade later, was similarly distinctive, but was led by the heart rather than the head, a bizarre, poetic, almost abstracted sort of horror-movie/romance hybrid that made you respond on an almost instinctive level. They were so different from each other that you wouldn’t have necessarily thought they came from the same filmmaker, except that they were each so different from everything else out there. Word’s been quiet for a while on his next movie, all-star, big-budget high-seas adventure “The Modern Ocean,” but there’s no project we want to see more.

25. Steven Spielberg
It’s weird to find Steven Spielberg, still the most famous filmmaker in the world, in the position of being underrated. And yet that’s where we are: The director’s most recent films, whether awards-y pics like “War Horse” or “Bridge Of Spies,” or more escapist fare like “The Adventures Of Tintin” or “The BFG,” have had mildly underwhelming responses from audiences and cinephiles alike. It’s likely that we’re so used to the man behind “Jaws,” “Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” “Schindler’s List” et. al., being so good, and making it so effortless, that the novelty has worn off, but take any of the movies he made in this decade and you’ll find shots, sequences or performances that no one else could have pulled off, and wholes that are rather more interesting than they might appear. Yeah, we’re not thrilled he’s doing “Ready Player One” next, but we’re sure even that will once again remind us that he’s the master, and the old dog continues to pull off all kinds of new tricks.

24. Christopher Nolan
If Spielberg’s no longer Mr. Bulletproof in the way he once was, Christopher Nolan might be the man who’s inherited that mantle — for the last decade, everything he’s touched turned to gold, and he’s just about the only person who could turn a World War II movie starring mostly unknowns into one of the major movie events of 2017 (with his next film, “Dunkirk”). To some, he’s a chilly filmmaker who uses blunt blockbuster instruments, but to us, he’s someone always capable of surprising, be it the morality play of “The Dark Knight;” building a James Bond film on a well of deep sorrow with “Inception;” giving the superhero movie a David Lean sweep with “The Dark Knight Rises;” or making his most personal and strangest film as a space opera with the flawed, totally fascinating “Interstellar.” The canvases might have gotten bigger, but Nolan’s still the same man who made “Following” and “Memento,” without having changed a single thing about his work.

23. Lars Von Trier
His rather played-out bad-boy rep can sometimes obscure the much simpler and more important fact of Lars Von Trier’s exceptional filmmaking talent. Whether operating within the self-imposed austerity of Dogme 95 with “Breaking The Waves;” experimenting with Brechtian staging in “Dogville;” or playing and provoking in equal measure in his more recent, more florid and atmospheric “Depression Trilogy” (“Antichrist,” “Melancholia,” “Nymphomaniac“), what makes Von Trier so significant a figure is not his tendency to rather self-defeatingly rattle cages but the way he seems to put everything — his very soul — into every single film he makes. The results are unpredictable and often confounding (his Cannes-winning “Dancer In The Dark,” for example) but never less than pure: sincere depictions of the landscape of Von Trier’s mind at the time, that vast place, full of wit and grief and questions lurking in dark places. His next, serial-killer story “The House That Jack Built” is due in 2018.

22. Wong Kar-Wai
In 2000, Wong Kar-wai made quite possibly the single most beautiful film of all time (“In The Mood For Love,” which came in at no. 5 on our Best Foreign Films of the Century list) and it’s tempting to regard his filmography as leading up to and away from that point. But though it is a thrilling entry point (featuring sublime photography from regular collaborator Christopher Doyle and starring talismanic presence Tony Leung), Wong’s 10-feature catalogue shows many different phases of growth and experimentation. The intoxicating textures of ‘Mood’ (and lesser follow-up “2046“) came after his episodic gay romance “Happy Together,” which occupies a brasher register, while “Chungking Express” feels like the apotheosis of his more freewheeling, spontaneous impulses. More recent work has perhaps not quite reached those heights — English-language debut “My Blueberry Nights” was a misfire — but with his next project being an 18-part online series, it seems Wong is back experimenting again and we cannot wait.

21. Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Good things come to those who wait. That’s what Hou Hsiao-Hsien proved with “The Assassin,” a film that had been in the works for decades, and actively in production for several years before its release last year. Since the 1980s, the Taiwanese director has been one of Asia’s most acclaimed directors, his meticulous, slow-burn, almost pastoral filmmaking shining through with masterpieces like “City Of Sadness,” “Millennium Mambo” and “Three Times,” as well as his French-language debut “Flight Of The Red Balloon.” But if anyone had forgotten his talents in the eight years while he was away, they were swiftly reminded thanks to his last film, which took his very particular style and put it in the context of the martial-arts film. Those looking purely for action might have come away frustrated, but everyone else found an exquisitely beautiful film where virtually every frame could take your breath away. There’s no news yet on his next project, but hopefully it’ll come together faster, because we need more Hou in our lives.