The Greatest Film Directors of all Times

Selected by piero scaruffi | Best films of all times | Film directors | Back to cinema
1900's 1910's 1920's 1930's 1940's 1950's 1960's 1970's 1980's 1990's 2000's 2010's
(Not very reliable after #30. And, needless to say, it is very difficult to compare filmmakers of different decades who were working with wildly different technologies. We don't know what Lang and Chaplin would have done if they had lived in the 21st century and we don't know what today's best filmmakers would do in silent black-and-white cinema).
  1. Orson Welles
  2. Alfred Hitchcock
  3. Ingmar Bergman
  4. Roman Polanski
  5. Theo Angelopoulos
  6. Bela Tarr
  7. Andrej Tarkovsky
  8. Michelangelo Antonioni
  9. Robert Altman
  10. Federico Fellini
  11. Luis Bunuel
  12. Akira Kurosawa
  13. Francis Ford Coppola
  14. Robert Aldrich
  15. Lars Von Trier
  16. Sam Peckinpah
  17. Emir Kusturica
  18. Alejandro Jodorowsky
  19. Sion Sono
  20. John Ford
  21. Zhang Yimou
  22. Martin Scorsese
  23. Terrence Malick
  24. Edward Yang
  25. Fritz Lang
  26. Billy Wilder
  27. David Lynch
  28. Charles Chaplin
  29. Woody Allen
  30. Peter Greenaway
  31. Pedro Almodovar
  32. Manuel DeOliveira
  33. Josef von Sternberg
  34. Majid Majidi
  35. Elia Kazan
  36. Stanley Kubrick
  37. Michael Haneke
  38. Rainer Fassbinder
  39. Vittorio DeSica
  40. John Woo
  41. Jan Svankmajer
  42. Chan-wook Park
  43. Blake Edwards
  44. Sergej Paradzanov
  45. Ermanno Olmi
  46. Christopher Nolan
  47. Sergio Leone
  48. Satoshi Kon
  49. Krzysztof Kieslowski
  50. Kim Ki-duk
  51. Howard Hawks
  52. Yasujiro Ozu
  53. Jean Renoir
  54. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
  55. Hirokazu Kore-eda
  56. John Huston
  57. Sergei Eisenstein
  58. Frank Capra
  59. Brian DePalma
  60. John Boorman
  61. Nicolas Roeg
  62. Quentin Tarantino
  63. Terry Gilliam
  64. George Stevens
  65. Kevin Smith
  66. Chang-dong Lee
  67. Johnnie To
  68. Don Siegel
  69. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
  70. Pedro Costa
  71. Satyajit Ray
  72. Alice Rohrwacher
  73. Jafar Panahi
  74. Gyorgy Palfi
  75. Gaspar Noe
  76. Sergei Loznitsa
  77. Wim Wenders
  78. Alain Resnais
  79. Spike Jonze
  80. King Vidor
  81. Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu
  82. Michel Gondry
  83. Carl Theodor Dreyer
  84. Christian Petzold
  85. Luc Besson
  86. Bernardo Bertolucci
  87. Carlos Reygadas
  88. Mathieu Kassovitz
  89. Sydney Pollack
  90. Shohei Imamura
  91. Hu Bo
  92. Miguel Gomes
  93. Bae Yong-Kyun
  94. Fatih Akin
  95. Kenji Mizoguchi
  96. Preston Sturges
  97. Abbas Kiarostami
  98. Aki Kaurismaki
  99. Istvan Szabo
  100. John Cassavetes
  101. Ming-Liang Tsai
  102. David Wark Griffith
  103. Vsevolod Pudovkin
  104. Dziga Vertov
  105. Joachim Trier
  106. Masahiro Shinoda
  107. Raul Ruiz
  108. Arturo Ripstein
  109. Harmony Korine
  110. Takeshi Kitano
  111. Jaromil Jires
  112. Jerzy Skolimowski
  113. Jean-Luc Godard
  114. Joel Coen
  115. Michael Cimino
  116. Leos Carax
  117. Ama Lily Amirpour
  118. Carol Reed
  119. Richard Quine
  120. Otto Preminger
  121. Michael Powell
  122. Takeshi Miike
  123. Dusan Makavejev
  124. Ernst Lubitsch
  125. Fred Zinnemann
  126. William Wyler
  127. Eskil Vogt
  128. Jacques Tati
  129. Paolo Sorrentino
  130. Susan Seidelman
  131. Kar-wai Wong
  132. Ridley Scott
  133. George Miller
  134. Joseph Mankiewicz
  135. Elem Klimov
  136. Chen Kaige
  137. Matthew Ryan Hoge
  138. Werner Herzog
  139. Abel Ferrara
  140. Arnaud Desplechin
  141. Michael Curtiz
  142. Henri Clouzot
  143. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
  144. Robert Wiene
  145. Marcel Carne`
  146. James Cameron
  147. Joon-ho Bong
  148. Bi Gan
  149. Maren Ade
  150. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
  151. Buster Keaton
  152. Roberto Benigni
  153. Richard Fleischer