The 100 Best And Most Exciting Directors Working Today

20. Steven Soderbergh
We would make a crack about Steven Soderbergh being the comeback kid, given his supposed retirement back in 2013, but really, he never went away. Since going out with an extraordinary triple bill of “Magic Mike,” a skewering of the American Dream disguised as bachelorette-party entertainment; “Side Effects,” a sly, subversive take on the ’80s erotic thriller; and most amazingly of all, a biopic that was actually good with “Behind The Candelabra,” Soderbergh shot 10 movies’ worth of material across two seasons of “The Knick,” and did the best work of his career in the process. And now, American cinema’s most restless, experimental, and knowledgeable filmmaker is going back to the feature-length form, both with mysterious HBO project “Mosaic,” and with heist comedy “Logan Lucky” with Adam Driver, Channing Tatum and Daniel Craig. And though, as we said, it never felt like he was ever really retiring, God, it’s good to have him back.

19. Bong Joon-Ho
If Korea has the most exciting cinema in the world right now (and between the aformentioned Park Chan-Wook and Kim Jee-woon, plus very different filmmakers like Kim Ki-Duk and Hong Sang-Soo, it might well), Bong Joon-Ho is its most exciting director. Since breaking out with the extraordinary epic police procedural “Memories Of Murder,” he’s tackled genres including the monster movie, the Hitchcockian thriller and the dystopian sci-fi with “The Host,” “Mother” and “Snowpiercer,” and each time turned out masterpieces that no other filmmaker could have pulled off. Each film takes the familiar template and adds subversive humor, indelible characters, unexpected texture and a dash of social realism, resulting in something that ends up feeling entirely fresh. English-language debut “Snowpiercer” had its release botched and never got the audience it deserved, but we hope that’ll change with his latest, “Okja” starring Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, which Netflix will debut.

18. Steve McQueen
There’s still a long way to go, but in future years Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” winning Best Picture will likely seem a watershed moment not just for its obvious token appeal within an industry noted for its lack of diversity, but because of the type of film it is. Brutal, austere and made with singleminded artistic vision, “Driving Miss Daisy” it is not. But of course, we should have expected as much: McQueen’s previous two films, “Hunger” and “Shame,” which gave career-defining roles to Michael Fassbender, were similarly excoriating, unsentimentalized portraits of men trapped in prisons literal and figurative. The news that his HBO series “Codes of Conduct,” which we were greatly anticipating, will not be airing after all is disappointing, but at least he’ll soon be back on the big screen with “Widows,” a female-fronted heist thriller starring Viola Davis, and it will be fascinating to see how McQueen approaches such a high concept.

17. Ava DuVernay
Actors have become great filmmakers; cinematographer and editors have become great filmmakers; screenwriters have become great filmmakers; even, god help us, critics have become great filmmakers. But Ava DuVernay may be the first great filmmaker to emerge from PR, and if she’s any indication, maybe we should encourage a lot more publicity folk to change careers. DuVernay’s first feature after making the switch, microbudget drama “I Will Follow,” won her a fan in Roger Ebert, but it was follow-up “Middle Of Nowhere” that broke her out wider, winning her Best Director at Sundance. And then came “Selma,” one of the best political films of recent years, a film that looked at Martin Luther King not just as an icon, but as a man and as a politician. She’s already one of the great chroniclers of the African-American experience, something only cemented by her TV show “Queen Sugar,” maybe the best new drama of the fall, and by her imminent documentary “The 13th.” But she won’t be pigeonholed either: Next, she’ll adapt beloved YA sci-fi fantasy “A Wrinkle In Time” for Disney.

16. David Fincher
Somehow, in the aftermath of one of his greatest successes with “Gone Girl,” David Fincher ended up having what’s likely one of the most difficult periods of his career since “Alien3,” with HBO pulling the plug on not just one but two of his projects there. But Fincher’s come back from worse before, and he remains mainstream film’s most subversive and challenging talent when he’s on top form. Not every one of his projects completely lands — we maintain that “Benjamin Button” was underrated by cinephiles, but will acknowledge that “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” was bloated and a little hollow. But when he’s on form, and he usually is — proving the perfect partner and counterpoint to Aaron Sorkin with “The Social Network,” sneaking a pitch-black comedy of marriage into the clothes of a pulp thriller with “Gone Girl,” making an undisputed masterpiece with “Zodiac” — he’s one of the best. He’ll be back next year with new Netflix series “Mindhunter,” and it can’t come soon enough.

15. Pedro Almodóvar
It’s hard to do justice in brief to all the life and drama and color and emotion that comprises the work of Spain’s most consistently inventive and distinctive auteur, but seeing as we can’t just describe his filmography in a string of fire emojis, let’s describe it in microcosm. In one of his masterpieces “Volver” (which ranks alongside “Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown,” “All About My Mother” and “Talk to Her” as his greatest work, though everything he’s ever done bar misfire “I’m So Excited” is [fire emoji]), there’s a single shot that encapsulates his peculiar genius, and it is a simple overhead shot of Penélope Cruz chopping tomatoes. The rambunctious joie de vivre on display in this moment combines food and sex and a powerful femininity into one delectable, emblematic image. Almodóvar’s films are intricate celebrations of complex womanhood as an elemental force, and though they can verge on the grotesque, they are never less than wholly, magnificently human.

14. Jane Campion
The first woman to win the Palme d’Or, and the second to pick up a Best Director nomination, Jane Campion is undoubtedly a pioneer for female filmmakers, but to describe her as only that would be to do her an enormous disservice. A regular at Cannes even before her first feature, “Sweetie,” debuted, the New Zealander’s gone on to be a filmmaker of enormous emotional sensitivity and acute detail, be it in homegrown drama “An Angel At My Table;” the unexpected Oscar hit “The Piano;” or more recent period drama “Bright Star,” a completely gorgeous, utterly devastating film that never quite got the attention it deserved. And “Top Of The Lake” (soon to get a second season), her TV series, showcased some of the best work of her career. She tells stories that would be overlooked by male filmmakers, which makes her one of the most vital voices out there, but you suspect she could tackle virtually any material and make it utterly compelling.

13. Asghar Farhadi
Cinema in general, and Iranian film in particular, suffered a huge loss with the recent death of master Abbas Kiarostami, but if part of the measure of any legend is the filmmaking he inspires and lays groundwork for, Kiarostami’s legacy is assured because, in large part, of Asghar Farhadi. He came to major prominence after the international breakthrough of his engrossing humanist masterpiece “A Separation,” but Farhadi’s prior titles, especially “Fireworks Wednesday” and “About Elly,” prove just how assured a filmmaker he was long before his Best Foreign Film Oscar. Creating vastly absorbing and deeply relatable human dramas that are both culturally specific and utterly universal, his subsequent films “The Past” and this year’s Cannes title “The Salesman” do not quite attain the dizzying heights of his very best work, and yet they’re both still extraordinary. That tells you all you need to know about the brilliance of Farhadi, perhaps our era’s greatest, most incandescently empathetic chronicler of human relationships.

12. Alfonso Cuarón
The Playlist has had a collective crush on Alfonso Cuarón since ’round about the time when, tacking against the current and having already made two Hollywood films, “A Little Princess” and “Great Expectations” (both solid but hardly spectacular), he went back home to Mexico and made the brilliant “Y Tu Mamá También.” But our crush blossomed into full-on obsession after he followed up best-in-series Harry Potter movie ‘Prisoner of Azkaban‘ with his peerless, brilliantly shot sci-fi masterpiece “Children Of Men.” It took seven years and a little space doodle called “Gravity” before the rest of the world, or at least the Academy, caught up to us, but since then, the news that he is not channeling his Best Director success into one of the big-budget tentpoles he was offered in the aftermath, but again going back to Mexico to shoot a smaller-scale Spanish-language drama, only makes us love him more. Alfonso Cuarón, will you marry us?

11. Yorgos Lanthimos
This list bristles with filmmakers who have delivered influential classics that create entire mini-movements. But amid this august crowd of visionary auteurs, Greek Weird Wave pioneer Yorgos Lanthimos stands apart, with a voice and a vision that defies imitation. “Dogtooth” was surely one of the most distinctive films of all time, and if follow-up “Alps” didn’t quite connect in the same way, he made good with last year’s epic yet intimate, bifurcated, alternate-universe mindfuck “The Lobster.” A loopy, scabrous yet oddly moving investigation into the social pressures of relationships, it featured a career-best Colin Farrell heading up an eclectic ensemble. His next film, “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer” will reteam them and add Nicole Kidman and Alicia Silverstone to the mix for what is sure to be another defiantly uncategorizable, twistedly smart slice of dream logic. You do you, Yorgos Lanthimos, because God knows, nobody else would even know where to begin.