(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).
- Orson Welles
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Ingmar Bergman
- Roman Polanski
- Theo Angelopoulos
- Bela Tarr
- Andrej Tarkovsky
- Michelangelo Antonioni
- Robert Altman
- Federico Fellini
- Luis Bunuel
- Akira Kurosawa
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Robert Aldrich
- Lars Von Trier
- Sam Peckinpah
- Emir Kusturica
- Alejandro Jodorowsky
- Sion Sono
- John Ford
- Zhang Yimou
- Martin Scorsese
- Terrence Malick
- Edward Yang
- Fritz Lang
- Billy Wilder
- David Lynch
- Charles Chaplin
- Woody Allen
- Peter Greenaway
- Pedro Almodovar
- Manuel DeOliveira
- Josef von Sternberg
- Majid Majidi
- Elia Kazan
- Stanley Kubrick
- Michael Haneke
- Rainer Fassbinder
- Vittorio DeSica
- John Woo
- Jan Svankmajer
- Chan-wook Park
- Blake Edwards
- Sergej Paradzanov
- Ermanno Olmi
- Christopher Nolan
- Sergio Leone
- Satoshi Kon
- Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Kim Ki-duk
- Howard Hawks
- Yasujiro Ozu
- Jean Renoir
- Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
- Hirokazu Kore-eda
- John Huston
- Sergei Eisenstein
- Frank Capra
- Brian DePalma
- John Boorman
- Nicolas Roeg
- Quentin Tarantino
- Terry Gilliam
- George Stevens
- Kevin Smith
- Chang-dong Lee
- Johnnie To
- Don Siegel
- Jean-Pierre Jeunet
- Pedro Costa
- Satyajit Ray
- Alice Rohrwacher
- Jafar Panahi
- Gyorgy Palfi
- Gaspar Noe
- Sergei Loznitsa
- Wim Wenders
- Alain Resnais
- Spike Jonze
- King Vidor
- Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu
- Michel Gondry
- Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Christian Petzold
- Luc Besson
- Bernardo Bertolucci
- Carlos Reygadas
- Mathieu Kassovitz
- Sydney Pollack
- Shohei Imamura
- Hu Bo
- Miguel Gomes
- Bae Yong-Kyun
- Fatih Akin
- Kenji Mizoguchi
- Preston Sturges
- Abbas Kiarostami
- Aki Kaurismaki
- Istvan Szabo
- John Cassavetes
- Ming-Liang Tsai
- David Wark Griffith
- Vsevolod Pudovkin
- Dziga Vertov
- Joachim Trier
- Masahiro Shinoda
- Raul Ruiz
- Arturo Ripstein
- Harmony Korine
- Takeshi Kitano
- Jaromil Jires
- Jerzy Skolimowski
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Joel Coen
- Michael Cimino
- Leos Carax
- Ama Lily Amirpour
- Carol Reed
- Richard Quine
- Otto Preminger
- Michael Powell
- Takeshi Miike
- Dusan Makavejev
- Ernst Lubitsch
- Fred Zinnemann
- William Wyler
- Eskil Vogt
- Jacques Tati
- Paolo Sorrentino
- Susan Seidelman
- Kar-wai Wong
- Ridley Scott
- George Miller
- Joseph Mankiewicz
- Elem Klimov
- Chen Kaige
- Matthew Ryan Hoge
- Werner Herzog
- Abel Ferrara
- Arnaud Desplechin
- Michael Curtiz
- Henri Clouzot
- Nuri Bilge Ceylan
- Robert Wiene
- Marcel Carne`
- James Cameron
- Joon-ho Bong
- Bi Gan
- Maren Ade
- Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
- Buster Keaton
- Roberto Benigni
- Richard Fleischer
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