Directors’ 100 Greatest Films of All Time 2012

But since the critics’ poll has been going since 1952, and the directors’ only since 1992, it’s the former that has the gravitas.

But the directors’ choices this time have created their own startling surprise. Not only has Citizen Kane not won, it hasn’t even come a clear second, while the critics‘ favourite, Vertigo, isn’t even in the top six. The winner, Ozu’s magisterial Tokyo Story, is of course a mainstay in these lists, and yet it’s intriguing that it should top the directors’ poll, for the formal aesthetic of Ozu’s films is so singular, so patient and precise, that his direct influence on the films of other directors is not always obviously apparent. And yet the triumph of Tokyo Story (along with the presence of Bicycle Thieves at number 10) is a recognition of the fact that sometimes the most powerful films seem at first to be the simplest – and that an unforgettably framed image of an ageing married couple sitting contemplatively on a seafront can say more than a thousand lines of dialogue.

It’s striking also that where the critics’ top ten features three films from the silent era, and nothing later than the 1960s, the earliest film on the directors’ list is Citizen Kane (1941). The directors have chosen four films from the 1970s, including two mid-decade films making their first appearance in the top ten: Tarkovsky’s poetic and intimate Mirror and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which interestingly replaces Raging Bull, a fixture in the directors’ top ten in both 1992 and 2002.

The appearance of such boldly defiant, bravura technical accomplishments as 2001, Apocalypse Now, Citizen Kane and The Godfather might be expected, for each stands as magnificent proof that boundless ambition need not equal folly. The legendary stories of their production are a reminder to anyone picking up a camera that after the blood, sweat and tears of creation – a process best captured, of course, by Fellini in 8½ – there just might come a triumph.

— James Bell

Ozu Yasujirô, 1953

48 votes

The final part of Ozu Yasujirô’s loosely connected ‘Noriko’ trilogy is a devastating story of elderly grandparents brushed aside by their self-involved family.

Subtle and sensitive, Tokyo Story lets the viewer experience the tensions and demands that modern life makes on people – here family members.

— Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Stanley Kubrick, 1968

42 votes

Stanley Kubrick took science fiction cinema in a grandly intelligent new direction with this epic story of man’s quest for knowledge.

This is the film I’ve seen more than any other in my life. 40 times or more. My life altered when I discovered it when I was about seven in Buenos Aires. It was my first hallucinogenic experience, my great artistic turning-point and also the moment when my mother finally explained what a foetus was and how I came into the world. Without this film I would never have become a director.

— Gaspar Noé

Orson Welles, 1941

42 votes

Given extraordinary freedom by Hollywood studio RKO for his debut film, boy wonder Welles created a modernist masterpiece that is regularly voted the best film ever made.

Welles’s feat of imagination in Citizen Kane remains dazzling and inspiring. Cinema aspiring to great art, political import – and delivered with unabashed showmanship. The fervour of the work is as excited and electric as ever. The thriller plot never disappoints.

— Kenneth Branagh

Federico Fellini, 1963

40 votes

Federico Fellini triumphantly conjured himself out of a bad case of creative block with this autobiographical magnum opus about a film director experiencing creative block.

8½ is a film I saw three times in a row in the cinema. This is chaos at its most elegant and intoxicating. You can’t take your eyes off the screen, even if you don’t know where it’s heading. A testament to the power of cinema: you don’t quite understand it but you give yourself up to let it take you wherever.

— Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

A true classic has to be both intimate and universal. To speak about cinema through cinema requires a voice unwavering in its passion and purity. 8½ speaks as much about life as it does about art – and it makes certain to connect both. A portrait of the teller and his craft – a lustful, sweaty, gluttonous poem to cinema.

— Guillermo del Toro

Martin Scorsese, 1976

34 votes

Martin’s Scorsese’s unsettling story of disturbed New York cab driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a classic of 70s cinema.

A film so vivid, hypnotic and corrosive that it feels forever seared onto your eyeballs, Taxi Driver turns a city, a time and a state of mind into a waking nightmare that’s somehow both horribly real and utterly dreamlike.

— Edgar Wright

Francis Ford Coppola, 1979

33 votes

Transplanting the story of Joseph Conrad’s colonial-era novel Heart of Darkness to Vietnam, Francis Ford Coppola created a visually mesmerising fantasia on the spectacle of war.

Coppola evoked the high-voltage, dark identity quest, journeying into overload; the wildness and nihilism – all captured in operatic and concrete narrative, with the highest degree of difficulty. A masterpiece.

— Michael Mann

Francis Ford Coppola, 1972

31 votes

The first of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy about the Corleone crime family is the disturbing story of a son drawn inexorably into his father’s Mafia affairs.

A classic, but I never tire of it. The screenplay is just so watertight, and Michael’s journey is one of the best protagonist arcs ever created.

— Justin Kurzel

Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

31 votes

A former detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a woman apparently possessed by the past, in Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession.

[These are the scenes or aspects I usually think about in the movies I have thought about most often…] In Vertigo, after he’s worked so hard to remake her and finally she emerges: hair dyed platinum, grey suit, misty lens. It’s her!

— Miranda July

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974

30 votes

Andrei Tarkovsky drew on memories of a rural childhood before WWII for this personal, impressionistic and unconventional film poem.

I must have been around 13 when I first watched Mirror. This time I realised that there are films that are not even meant to be ‘understood’. It’s the poetry of cinema in its purest form, on a very delicate verge of being pretentious – which makes its genius even more striking.

— Alexei Popogrebsky

Vittorio De Sica, 1949

29 votes

Vittorio De Sica’s story of a father and son searching for a stolen bicycle on the streets of Rome is a classic of postwar Italian cinema.

My absolute favourite, the most humanistic and political film in history.

— Roy Andersson

Jean-Luc Godard, 1960

27 votes

About an American girl student’s encounter with a young hoodlum in Paris.

The first modern movie, pure cinema avant-garde.

— Manuel Ferrari

Martin Scorsese, 1980

26 votes

Starring Robert De Niro as the middleweight boxer Jake La Motta, Scorsese’s biopic is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest films of the 1980s.

Extremely brutal, extremely beautiful, Raging Bull is a film of confession and redemption. Perhaps one of the last great films from Hollywood before it turned its back completely on an adult audience.

— Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

Ingmar Bergman, 1966

24 votes

A nurse (Bibi Andersson) and an actress who refuses to speak (Liv Ullmann) seem to fuse identities in Ingmar Bergman’s disturbing, formally experimental psychological drama.

My favourite of Bergman’s psychological chamber films.

— Greg Mottola

François Truffaut, 1959

25 votes

The directorial debut of film critic François Truffaut, this autobiographical story of a wayward child marked a fresh start for French cinema.

The 400 Blows is a highly sensitive recreation of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood, unsympathetic parents, oppressive teachers and petty crime – a remarkable first feature, mirroring one’s own life and times so effectively.

— Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966

25 votes

The life of a 15th century icon painter takes centre stage in Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic meditation on the place of art in turbulent times.

An Ivan the Terrible of the post-Stalinist generation, Andrei Rublev is a manifesto for the continuity of Russian thinking that undermined the Soviet system. The creator’s fable in the third act remains one of the most imposing pieces of its kind in the entire history of art.

— Andrei Ujica

Ingmar Bergman, 1984

24 votes

The grand summation of Ingmar Bergman’s career, this epic family drama drew on the director’s own childhood experiences in early 20th century Sweden.

Fanny & Alexander wonderfully encapsulated the history of the baleful effect of Christianity on paganism. Plus the first hour’s wonderful evocation of the child’s perfect Christmas.

— Terry Jones

Akira Kurosawa, 1954

22 votes

Rice farmers hire a band of samurai to defend them against marauding bandits in Akira Kurosawa’s influential epic, a touchstone for action movies ever since.

Groundbreaking cinema that set the standard for action films, weaving great characterisation, a strongly crafted story and stunning cinematography to ultimately offer a compelling philosophy about the nature of violence.

— Ann Turner

Akira Kurosawa, 1950

21 votes

Credited with bringing Japanese cinema to worldwide audiences, Akira Kurosawa’s breakthrough tells the story of a murder in the woods from four differing perspectives.

The only thing that is fact in this film is that a samurai is dead and a woman has been raped. Akiru Kurosawa’s tale unfolds to challenge our perceptions of truth and plays with what our expectations of this elusive search are. This is filmmaking of the highest order.

— Akin Omotoso

Stanley Kubrick, 1975

19 votes

Stanley Kubrick’s exquisitely detailed adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel about the picaresque exploits of an 18th century Irish adventurer.

A kind of perfect film – a fully realised universe, like walking through a living, breathing museum. The scale of achievements within the cinematography alone will never be equalled. Baroque, elegant, and yet somehow still raw, it is film as dreamscape, every individual component subjugated to the expression of the whole. Kubrick seems interested in everything in ways other filmmakers seem not to be. The rigour behind this film and his wish to strive for perfection, for something not yet seen, is unbelievable. The interaction of image and music is perfect. The wordless seduction of Lady Lyndon by Barry set to Schubert is one of the most sublime sequences in film: the play of glances at the card table (noticed by her companion), Lady Lyndon’s slow walk outside, Barry’s approach glimpsed through the window, the slow tracking shot as he approaches her, the turn, the gaze, the first kiss. Incredible.

— Duane Hopkins

Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955

19 votes

The penultimate film by the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer is a parable on the power of faith, set in a remote religious community.

Ordet touches your inner side deeply. You feel the invisible world. From the moment you see this film, you start to believe in miracles – motion pictures being one of them! There might not be a better film in white (nor in black-and-white) and no better hypnotism of space.

— Luis Miñarro

Robert Bresson, 1966

18 votes

Robert Bresson’s distinctive pared down style elicits extraordinary pathos from this devastating tale of an abused donkey passing from owner to owner.

Au hazard Balthazar is a hieratic but nevertheless profoundly moving film, by the auteur who perhaps, more than any other, explored the specific possibilities of cinematographic expression.

— Eugène Green

Charles Chaplin, 1936

17 votes

The final outing for Charlie Chaplin’s beloved Tramp character finds him enduring the pratfalls and humiliations of work in an increasingly mechanised society.

Absolute genius of cinema. Director, producer, screenwriter, Chaplin did everything! I choose Modern Times but several films from him could be in this list.

— Pablo Giorgelli

Jean Vigo, 1934

17 votes

Newly-weds begin their life together on a working barge in this luminous and poetic romance, the only feature film by director Jean Vigo.

That underwater scene where Jean opens his eyes underwater in a despondent cleansing, a scene that’s been homaged a million times ([The] Graduate being the most obvious to me), carries me through most days. Jean Vigo is a god. He was the son of an outlaw. Also this was an introduction to Michel Simon for me. Emotional, Sloppy, Manic, Cinema. 

— Josh Safdie

F. W. Murnau, 1927

17 votes

Lured to Hollywood by producer William Fox, German Expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau created one of the silent cinema’s last and most luminous masterpieces.

A big budget Hollywood movie with plenty of special effects, 1920s style. Murnau for greatest director?

— Ben Hopkins

Jean Renoir, 1939

17 votes

Made on the cusp of WWII, Jean Renoir’s satire of the upper-middle classes was banned as demoralising by the French government for two decades after its release.

A big budget Hollywood movie with plenty of special effects, 1920s style. Murnau for greatest director?

— Ben Hopkins

Orson Welles, 1958

15 votes

Orson Welles’s return to Hollywood after ten years working in Europe is a sleazy border tale in which he takes centre stage as gargantuan detective Hank Quinlan.

The second Orson Welles movie in my list. Citizen Kane is his most acclaimed work but personally I love this one even more. The story has its wonderful pulpy aspects but Welles gives it tremendous ambivalence and depth. Directed with great gusto, awesome photography and wonderful music by the great Henry Mancini.

— Martin Koolhoven

Charles Laughton, 1955

15 votes

Actor Charles Laughton’s only film as a director is a complete one-off, a terrifying parable of the corruption of innocence featuring a career-best performance from Robert Mitchum.

This tense, exquisite, malevolent little song is one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen after Rembrant’s The Abduction of Proserpina.

— Emily Wardill

Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966

15 votes

Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece about the turbulent last years of French colonial rule in Algeria, seen from the perspective of both the guerrilla revolutionaries and the French authorities.

The Battle of Algiers for me is the combination of Battleship Potemkin and Pather Panchali. It‘s not simply political. It has a documentary feel to it, which makes it convincing and strong.

— Kutlug Ataman

Federico Fellini, 1954

15 votes

A brutish travelling strongman (Anthony Quinn) acquires a waif-like young assistant (Giulietta Masina) before taking to the road in Federico Fellini’s acclaimed neo-realist fable.

La strada is a great saga of love and bondage, very raw and real, almost brutal in its portrayal. The images are so strong that they refuse to dim with the passage of time.

— Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979

14 votes

As a teenager, I used to go the Everyman cinema in Hampstead where I would devour the films of Tarkovsky, Bergman, Rosselini, Fellini and other giants of what was then hard-to-find ‘alternative’ cinema. Stalker is a film I keep returning to for its equivocal plot, atmospheric score and beautiful camera work.

— Gary Tarn

Charles Chaplin, 1931

14 votes

The Tramp wins the affections of a blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill) in this hilarious but heartbreaking comedy – one of Charlie Chaplin’s uncontested masterpieces.

Chaplin was the best at everything: actor, director, screenwriter, producer, clown, acrobat, dancer, musician. The art of counterpoint: scenes that are still funny today, in a melodramatic script that’s stayed touching. It’s impossible not to cry in the last scene, one of the most beautiful scenes ever made.

— Michel Hazanavicius

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960

14 votes

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking and controversial arthouse milestone, the mystery of a woman’s disappearance from a Mediterranean island is left unresolved.

All ten on this list could be Antonioni films. Every one of them changed the game, especially from this film on. It was as if the window panes had been cleaned and you could see the world you lived in more clearly. With this film, cinema came out of the cave.

— Ron Peck

Federico Fellini, 1972

14 votes

Federico Fellini returned for inspiration to his own childhood in 1930s Rimini for this colourful comedy-drama about life in a small seaside town under Fascist rule.

A film hand-woven with memories, made to be remembered even before having seen it.

— Rodrigo Cortés

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964

14 votes

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s third feature abandons the profane in favour of the sacred in a documentary-like retelling of the story of Christ.

Only an atheist director could make the ultimate film about religion.

— Bruce LaBruce

Francis Ford Coppola, 1974

14 votes

The expansive second part of Francis Ford Coppola’s Mafia saga continues the Corleone family story, charting in parallel young Vito’s earlier rise to prominence.

Sequels are tough at the best of times. Francis Ford Coppola not only redefined what a sequel could be but he achieved something that is notoriously difficult in film: two timelines, father and son, merge to give a complete story of the Corleones. This film is a gem.

— Akin Omotoso

Elem Klimov, 1985

14 votes

Byelorussia, 1943. Story of Flera, a youth who joins the partisans, before the Nazis execute all the inhabitants of his village. Flera witnesses many atrocities committed by the Nazis and is physically aged by his experiences.

It’s no wonder Klimov could never make a movie after this. How could you? Filmmaking at the highest level.

— Darrell James Roodt

Abbas Kiarostami, 1989

13 votes

Drama-documentary, based on the true story of an unemployed movie buff, Hossein Sabzian, who passes himself off as the celebrated movie director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a woman he meets on a bus. He is invited into her middle-class home and leads her family to believe that, if they finance him, they will appear in his next film. Eventually, they come to suspect he is an imposter and call the police. He ends up in jail where his trial is filmed by Kiarostami…

A re-enactment of a re-enactment of a re-enactment, Close Up essentially destroys the very conception of a ‘documentary’ and yet is one of the best ever made.

— Ashim Ahluwalia

Billy Wilder, 1959

13 votes

On the run from Chicago mobsters, two musicians don drag to join an all-girl jazz band fronted by Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) in Billy Wilder’s hugely popular comedy.

No justification needed for Some Like It Hot, as it will appear in dozens of ‘desert-island film’ lists. Sheer entertainment and great lines.

— Malcolm Le Grice

Federico Fellini, 1960

13 votes

Federico Fellini’s epic charts a week in the life of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) as the excesses of modern Roman life go on around him.

Ever dear to me personally, La dolce vita was the first ‘real’ film I saw, when I was 13. It‘s also one of the most emblematic of Fellini’s genius.

— Eugène Green

Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927

13 votes

Silent cinema at its most sublimely expressive, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece is an austere but hugely affecting dramatisation of the trial of St Joan.

Ever dear to me personally, La dolce vita was the first ‘real’ film I saw, when I was 13. It‘s also one of the most emblematic of Fellini’s genius.

— Eugène Green

Jacques Tati, 1967

13 votes

Jacques Tati directs and stars in this fun account of the bumbling M Hulot’s day in Paris.

Tati is the most generous and humble filmmaker I know. The funniest and the most serious. He and Jerry Lewis are the best architects of cinema, of rhythm and colour; both of them remind us that the worst thing about humour is that nobody takes it seriously.

— Javier Rebollo

Robert Bresson, 1956

13 votes

True story of the hazardous and daring wartime escape of a French officer from the condemned cell of a Nazi prison, with action set to Mozart’s Great C-Minor Mass.

Not quite sure what to say about this movie other than it’s one of the top five movies ever made. When they touch the ground at the end, I feel like I’ve been escaping with them. Never has a movie that gives away its ending the title been more suspenseful. The spoon slot, the little broom, the handkerchief pulley system… Like Fontaine, Bresson is the master.

— Benjamin Safdie

Luis Buñuel, 1961

13 votes

In Luis Buñuel’s controversial masterpiece, a novice nun gets more than she bargains for when she turns her dead uncle’s estate into a home for beggars.

Un Chien Andalou is still one of the most revolutionary films ever made but Viridiana has all Buñuel’s modernity in one mature work that contains the contradictory essence of the Spanish way.

— Luis Miñarro

Sergio Leone, 1968

12 votes

The railroad rushes westward, bringing power and progress with it, in Sergio Leone’s grandest spaghetti western, an operatic homage to Hollywood’s mythology of the Old West.

Once Upon a Time in the West is playful, political, poetic and so stylishly elaborate it’s almost parodic. That westward bound train must be one of film history’s most potent metaphors.

— Arild Andresen

Jean-Luc Godard, 1963

12 votes

Working with his biggest budget to date, Jean-Luc Godard created a sublime widescreen drama about marital breakdown, set during pre-production on a film shoot.

A truly beautiful and sad self-reflective movie about filmmaking.

— Norbert Pfaffenbichler

Billy Wilder, 1960

12 votes

In Wilder’s Oscar-winning comedy, Jack Lemmon plays an office worker who lends his apartment to adulterous superiors in order to get ahead.

The Apartment is the funniest recognition of the social climber that everybody has inside.

— Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Ingmar Bergman, 1968

11 votes

Painter’s pregnant wife tries to communicate with her husband, to give him the strength to combat his years and hallucinations, while he is obsessed with a woman with no understanding of the personality of the artist.

Milos Forman, 1975

11 votes

The comic energy and tragic weight of Jack Nicholson’s unforgettable lead performance make this a classic of 70s cinema.

A masterpiece for its characters, its actors, its story and its perfect blend of humor and drama.

— Jean-Marc Vallée

John Ford, 1956

11 votes

John Ford created perhaps the greatest of all westerns with this tale of a Civil War veteran doggedly hunting the Comanche who have kidnapped his niece.

Inscrutable faces under an endless sky. The dust of ages landing on a film.

— Rodrigo Cortés

Alfred Hitchcock, 1960

11 votes

Psychological horror thriller about lonely, disturbed young Norman Bates with an unhealthy mother fixation who runs an out of the way motel which Marion Crane, on the run and with a guilty secret, makes the mistake of staying in.

Psycho is a really strange black and white film where the protagonist dies halfway through. The viewer is left puzzled yet absorbed in the story. Unforgettable images: the shower, the stairs, the mansion… What a risky and daring film!

— Fernando Colomo

Dziga Vertov, 1929

11 votes

An impression of city life in the Soviet Union, The Man with a Movie Camera is the best-known film of experimental documentary pioneer Dziga Vertov.

An honest self-portrait of what we documentarists still do, not in a much more sophisticated way.

— Petra Seliskar

Claude Lanzmann, 1985

11 votes

The bravest tackling of the most difficult subject matter I’ve ever seen. Devastating and pitch-perfect.

— Saul Metzstein

David Lean, 1962

11 votes

An eccentric English officer inspires the Arabs to unite against the Turks during WWI in David Lean’s seven Oscar-winner, an epic in every sense.

David Lean and JG Ballard raise issues of empire, colonialism and the individual on a platform of cinematic reflection. The screenplay by Bolt is brilliant. The characters, O’Toole… The epic nature of this film has for me never been topped.

— Oliver Schmitz

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962

11 votes

Antonioni’s film charts the hot and cold relationship of a young couple in bustling Rome.

Antonioni [defined] the zeitgeist of the film century more precisely than any other.

— Thomas Clay

Robert Bresson, 1959

11 votes

Psychological study of a thief.

The most precise, scientific and, at the same time, realistic movie about a precise action.

— Manuel Ferrari

Satyajit Ray, 1955

11 votes

The first part of Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed Apu Trilogy is a lyrical, closely observed story of a peasant family in 1920s rural India.

Of all the films that I’ve ever seen, none can describe as deeply about the sacredness of human’s life as this beautiful and simple film does.

— Phan Dang-Di

Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

11 votes

I clearly remember the excitement I felt when I saw this film. It was the first one I saw from Hitch. After that, I saw almost all his films over a short period. I was around 15 or 16 and my parents gave me a book about him as a present. This was the first book about cinema I had in my life.

— Pablo Giorgelli

Martin Scorsese, 1990

11 votes

With GoodFellas Scorsese gives birth to the 21st century in one of the most influential films of the last two decades. A movie that can be rewatched endlessly and remain fresh and surprising. Perfect in every aspect, behind and in front of the camera.

— Guillermo del Toro

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966

10 votes

The refined visual style of Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni collides with swinging 60s London in this story of a man who may have unwittingly photographed a murder.

Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970

10 votes

Bernardo Bertolucci’s stylish period thriller stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as a repressed bureaucrat in Mussolini’s Italy who is assigned to kill his former professor.

Werner Herzog, 1972

10 votes

Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964

10 votes

The conflict of a woman between her husband, her lover, and the lover of her youth, and her failure to find happiness with any of them.

John Cassavetes, 1974

10 votes

Study of a middle-class Los Angeles housewife whose fragile mental state is aggravated by her husband’s insensitivity. Even after a six-month period in an institution, the pattern of her life continues as before.

Sergio Leone, 1966

10 votes

David Lynch, 1986

10 votes

In David Lynch’s idiosyncratic drama, a young man’s curiosity draws him into the twisted criminal sub-culture operating beneath the placid surface of his cosy hometown.

Jean Renoir, 1937

10 votes

Jean Renoir’s pacifist classic is set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during WWI, where class kinship is felt across national boundaries.

Terrence Malick, 1973

9 votes

A romantic account of a 15-year-old girl’s journey into violence, out of love for a 25 year-old South Dakota garbageman turned thrill killer.

Ridley Scott, 1982

9 votes

Loosely adapted from a novel by Phillip K. Dick, Ridley Scott’s dark, saturated vision of 2019 Los Angeles is a classic of popular science-fiction cinema.

Billy Wilder, 1950

9 votes

The most caustic of European émigré directors, Wilder explored the movie industry and the delusions of stardom in Hollywood’s great poison pen letter to itself.

Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953

9 votes

In war-torn 16th-century Japan, two men leave their wives to seek wealth and glory in Kenji Mizoguchi’s tragic supernatural classic.

Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly, 1951

9 votes

Hollywood’s troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.

Wong Kar Wai, 2000

9 votes

Roberto Rossellini, 1954

9 votes

This devastating study of a marriage coming apart during a holiday in Italy is the best known of the films Roberto Rossellini made with his wife Ingrid Bergman.

Jean-Luc Godard, 1962

9 votes

Jean-Luc Godard’s fourth feature – his third with wife and muse Anna Karina – charts in 12 tableaux a would-be actress’s descent into prostitution.

Ingmar Bergman, 1957

8 votes

During the plague-ravaged middle ages, a knight buys time for himself by playing chess with Death in Bergman’s much-imitated arthouse classic.

Michael Haneke, 2004

8 votes

Sergei M Eisenstein, 1925

8 votes

A fixture in the critical canon almost since its premiere, Sergei Eisenstein’s film about a 1905 naval mutiny was revolutionary in both form and content.

Fritz Lang, 1931

8 votes

For his first sound film Fritz Lang turned to the story of a child killer (Peter Lorre), who is hunted down by police and underworld alike.

Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007

8 votes

This operatic portrait of a diabolical oil baron is a formal tour de force and a compelling portrait of all-American 20th century sociopathy.

Stanley Kubrick, 1980

8 votes

Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of modern horror, based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel.

Buster Keaton, 1926

8 votes

Train driver Buster Keaton gives chase when Union agents steal his locomotive in this classic silent comedy set at the time of the American Civil War.

David Lynch, 2001

8 votes

Stanley Kubrick, 1971

8 votes

A dystopian future London is the playground of a teenage gang leader in Stanley Kubrick’s stylish, controversial take on Anthony Burgess’s novel about violence and free will.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974

8 votes

Fassbinder’s international breakthrough is an unconventional love story with devastating emotional power.

Ken Loach, 1969

8 votes

The tough, touching story of a northern schoolboy and the kestrel that brings hope to his hardscrabble life remains the most widely admired of Ken Loach’s films.

John Cassavetes, 1970

8 votes

Appalled and horrified by the death of their best friend, three middle-class, middle-aged family men explode and ricochet off on a drinking marathon from New York to London.

Sam Peckinpah, 1969

8 votes

A gang of outlaws goes out in a blaze of violence and glory in Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac film about the dying days of the wild west.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975

8 votes

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s novel, relocated to Benito Mussolini’s fascist republic.

Steven Spielberg, 1975

8 votes

Steven Spielberg laid the template for the modern summer blockbuster with this expert thriller about the hunt for a man-eating great white shark.

Luis Buñuel, 1950

Story of a group of wild children dominated by a young thug.

Jean-Luc Godard, 1965

7 votes

Riffing on the classic couple-on-the run movie, enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard took the narrative innovations of the French New Wave close to breaking point.

Luis Buñuel, 1928

7 votes

A surrealist film. Opening scene is of a man slicing the eyeball of a woman with a razor.

Roman Polanski, 1974

7 votes

Roman Polanski’s brilliant thriller stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye uncovering corruption in 1930s Los Angeles, a desert town where water equals power.

Jean Eustache, 1973

7 votes

Deals with the relations, largely sexual, between an anarchic young man and his two mistresses, one seemingly permanent, who keeps him, the other seemingly casual.

Claire Denis, 1998

7 votes

John Cassavetes, 1977

7 votes

Charles Chaplin, 1925

7 votes

Jean Vigo, 1933

7 votes

Anarchic study of life in a French boarding school.

Michael Cimino, 1977

7 votes

Along with Apocalypse Now, Michael Cimino’s brutal but ultimately contemplative war movie is a key American cinematic take on the Vietnam conflict.

Robert Bresson, 1983

7 votes

Bresson’s last film turns a Tolstoy novella about a forged banknote into a formidably focused meditation on the supposed root of all evil.

John Cassavetes, 1976

7 votes

Chris Marker, 1982

7 votes

Nicolas Roeg, 1973

7 votes

Set in off-season Venice, British director Nicolas Roeg’s tragedy combines an acute study of grief with a supernaturally charged thriller plot, to beautiful and devastating effect.

Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964

7 votes

Four episodes just before the Revolution of 1959 in Cuba illustrating the resistance to the dictator Batista.

Alain Resnais, 1961

7 votes

In Alain Resnais’ infamous art-house teaser, from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a male guest at a chateau claims he met a woman there the year before.

Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967

7 votes

(As derived from votes cast in the directors’ poll)

1. Federico Fellini (98 votes)

2. Stanley Kubrick (95 votes)

=3. Ingmar Bergman (82 votes)

=3. Francis Ford Coppola (82 votes)

5. Andrei Tarkovsky (81 votes)

6. Jean-Luc Godard (80 votes)

7. Martin Scorsese (75 votes)

8. Alfred Hitchcock (72 votes)

9. Kurosawa Akira (71 votes)

10. Orson Welles (68 votes)