Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Steven Spielberg
Top Three Films: 1) Schindler's List 2) Jaws 3) Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Also Worth Noting: Raiders of the Lost Ark
"In bringing a distinctly personal sensibility to the traditional genres of mass entertainment, Steven Spielberg rapidly became the most commercially successful director in cinema history. While it is impossible to deny either his Midas touch or his extraordinary technical proficiency, it has nonetheless become increasingly clear in recent years that he is perhaps more at home with sentimental 'family' fodder than with more sophisticated material." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
"One of the most famous Hollywood directors, Steven Spielberg has an intuitive sense of the hopes and fears of his audience. This quality and his showmanship have made him one of the greats, in the league of Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006) George Stevens
Top Three Films: 1) Shane 2) Giant 3) A Place in the Sun
Also Worth Noting: Woman of the Year
"People always count in a George Stevens film, and it is notable that even in his early comedies (and very good they are too), and in his later melodramas, he never quite allows sentiment to take over from sense, and so retains his capacity to move, rather than merely tug, at the heartstrings." - Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006) Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" "Mainly because of multiple takes and shooting from every possible angle, George Stevens took 22 years to make his last eight films. In the late 1920s, Stevens directed Laurel and Hardy two-reelers, and in the 1930s and early 1940s, a wide range of polished films including three comedies with Katharine Hepburn, a couple of Fred Astaire musicals, and a colonial adventure film, Gunga Din (1939). His later films were more personal, his working methods slower, and his style more deliberate." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006) Oliver Stone
Top Three Films: 1) JFK 2) Platoon 3) Natural Born Killers
Also Worth Noting: Salvador
Undoubtedly one of the most controversial directors in Hollywood, Oliver Stone has made films that are remarkable for both the way in which their subject matter is handled and the degree of controversy such handling inspires. Although he has served as a producer, screenwriter, and actor on a variety of films, Stone is consistently identified with his more political works, from 1986's Platoon, the first of his so-called Vietnam trilogy, to Nixon, his 1995 take on the finer points and parables of the Nixon administration. Despite this association with political films, Stone has stated that he considers his films "first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles," and that he believes himself to be a dramatist rather than a political filmmaker. -allmovie.com Preston Sturges
Top Three Films: 1) Sullivan's Travels 2) The Lady Eve 3) The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Also Worth Noting: The Palm Beach Story, Unfaithfully Yours
One of Hollywood's genuinely legendary directors, Preston Sturges redefined the boundaries and meaning of screen comedy as a filmmaker during part of the early '40s. The full range of his influence on movies, Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" however, extended far beyond the director's chair or the success of the pictures that he helmed. Sturges first made his mark in Hollywood as a screenwriter through a series of acclaimed (and still-admired) scripts across the 1930s whose qualities still resonate seven decades later. -allmovie.com Jan Švankmajer
Top Three Films:
1) Možnosti dialogu [Dimensions of Dialogue]
2) Tma/Světlo/Tma [Darkness/Light/Darkness]
3) Lekce Faust [Faust]
Also Worth Noting: Otesánek [Little Otik], Něco z Alenky [Alice]
The dark and surrealistic animated art of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer gained international renown in 1983 when his work from the 1960s was shown in a retrospective at the Annecy Animation Festival in France...His subsequent films are quite macabre and twist normal events and objects to give them subtly horrific and surreal overtones. -allmovie.com Quentin Tarantino
Top Three Films: 1) Pulp Fiction 2) Reservoir Dogs 3) Inglourious Basterds Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Also Worth Noting: Jackie Brown
Director/screenwriter/actor/producer Quentin Tarantino was perhaps the most distinctive and volatile talent to emerge in American film in the early '90s. Unlike the previous generation of American filmmakers, Tarantino learned his craft from his days as a video clerk rather than as a film-school student. Consequently, he developed an audacious fusion of pop culture and independent arthouse cinema; his films were thrillers that were distinguished as much by their clever, twisting dialogue as their outbursts of extreme violence. -allmovie.com Андрей Тарковский [Andrei Tarkovsky]
ANDREI TARKOVSKY
Top Three Films:
1) Андрей Рублёв [Andrei Rublev]
2) Сталкер [Stalker]
3) Зеркало [The Mirror]
Also Worth Noting: Солярис [Solaris]
"Some of the most intensely personal and visually powerful statements to have come out of Eastern Europe for many decades are made in Andrei Tarkovsky's seven films." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)
"Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow?" - Ingmar Bergman (The Magic Lantern, 1988) Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Béla Tarr
Top Three Films:
1) Sátántangó [Satan's Tango]
2) Werckmeister harmóniák [Werckmeister Harmonies]
3) Kárhozat [Damnation]
Also Worth Noting: Panelkapcsolat [The Prefab People]
A planned adaptation of Krasznahorkai's epic novel Satantango took over seven years to realize. The film, a 415-minute masterpiece, finally appeared to international acclaim in 1994. -allmovie.com Frank Tashlin
Top Three Films: 1) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? 2) The Girl Can't Help It 3) The Disorderly Orderly
Also Worth Noting: Artists and Models
"Lately respected comedy writer and director, who started out as a cartoonist. His work with Jerry Lewis has been especially highly regarded; while his exuberant style and ability to follow a gag through to its ultimate outrageous conclusion suggest an affinity more properly with silent comedy than with the sophisticated restrictions of sound." - (The International Encyclopedia of Film, 1972) Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" "His characters were cartoon-like grotesques (frequently played by the likes of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis), and his stories basically ragbag strings of gags rooted in slapstick and sexual innuendo, but there is a genuinely frenetic energy and anarchic, even surreal irreverence in his best films..." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999) Jacques Tati
Top Three Films: 1) Play Time
2) Mon oncle [My Uncle]
3) Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot [Mr. Hulot's Holiday]
Also Worth Noting: Jour de fête [The Big Day], Trafic [Traffic]
Filmmaker and actor Jacques Tati reinvented the art of slapstick comedy, expertly dissecting the nature of sight gags and pratfalls while exploiting viewer expectations to create an ambitious, richly detailed cinematic parlor game perfect for exploring the infinite mysteries of the modern world. -allmovie.com Bertrand Tavernier
Top Three Films: 1) Round Midnight
2) Un dimanche à la campagne [A Sunday in the Country] 3) L.627 Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema"
Also Worth Noting: Coup de torchon [Clean Slate], Daddy nostalgie [Daddy Nostalgia]
One of France's premiere directors, screenwriters, and producers, Bertrand Tavernier is renowned for making dramas encompassing themes as diverse as familial relationships, World War I, and contemporary social ills. Regardless of the subjects they explore, Tavernier lends his films great introspection and humanity, something that has established him as one of the French cinema's more progressive and compassionate figures. -allmovie.com Jacques Tourneur
Top Three Films:
1) Night of the Demon [Curse of the Demon] 2) Cat People 3) Out of the Past
Also Worth Noting: I Walked With a Zombie
"Jacques Tourneur, son of the late Maurice Tourneur, brings a certain French gentility to the American cinema...Tourneur's first films for Val Lewton - Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie - possessed a subtler dramatic force than those of Wise and Robson. Out of the Past is still Tourneur's masterpiece, a civilized treatment of an annihilating melodrama...All in all, Tourneur's career represents a triumph of taste over force." - Andrew Sarris (The American Cinema, 1968)
"The best pictures which he directed were those of suspense and genuine terror, though he also did well with those that had a great deal of action. He wisely resisted scenes with long patches of dialogue. When confronted with such scenes, he typically frowned and said, "It sounds so corny." - DeWitt Bodeen (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998) François Truffaut Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Top Three Films:
1) Les quatre cents coups [The 400 Blows]
2) Jules et Jim [Jules and Jim]
3) La nuit américaine [Day for Night]
Also Worth Noting: Baisers volés [Stolen Kisses]
"In his lesser films, he tended to rely too flagrantly on sentimental charm, melodramatic contrivance and romantic whimsy, and an insistent fascination with the mystery of women...His finest work, however, is precariously but deftly balanced between sympathetic involvement with his characters' doubts, frustration and confusion, and gently ironic detachment; accordingly, he favoured the medium close-up and medium-shot, linear but subtly elliptical narratives and, occasionally, voiceover narration, literary in tone." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)
"To make a film is to improve upon life, to arrange it to suit oneself, to prolong the games of childhood, to construct something that is at once a new toy and a vase in which one can arrange in a permanent way the ideas one feels in the morning." - François Truffaut 蔡明亮 [Tsai Ming-liang]
Top Three Films:
1) 不散 [Goodbye, Dragon Inn]
2) 河流 [The River] Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" 3) 你那 边几点 [What Time Is It There?]
Also Worth Noting: 洞 [The Hole], 风柜来的人 [The Boys From Fengkuei], 天邊一 朵雲 [The Wayward Cloud]
Along with Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang became one of Taiwan's most prominent directors during the 1990s. His films regularly appeared in festivals around the globe and he received lavish praise from film critics worldwide. -allmovie.com 塚本晋也 [Shinya Tsukamoto]
Top Three Films:
1) 鉄男 [Tetsuo: The Iron Man]
2) 六月の蛇 [A Snake of June]
3) 東京フィスト [Tokyo Fist]
Also Worth Noting: ヴィタール [Vital]
Constant comparisons to such distinctive celluloid experimentalists as David Cronenberg and David Lynch may give the uninitiated an idea of what to expect aesthetically and thematically from the works of renegade Japanese filmmaker/actor Shinya Tsukamoto, though as complimentary as they may be, the comparisons ultimately don't do justice to the remarkably original and frantic essence of his hauntingly jarring cinematic nightmares. From the cringe-inducing, hyper-kinetic body horror of Tetsuo: The Iron Man to the creeping deliberation of Gemini, Tsukamoto's intriguing body of work has isolated critics and audiences while building a Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" strong fan base who share his technophobe paranoia and cyber-punk sensibility. -allmovie.com Edgar G. Ulmer
Top Three Films: 1) Detour 2) The Black Cat 3) The Naked Dawn
Also Worth Noting: Ruthless, Strange Illusion
Edgar George Ulmer was one of the very few genuinely creative filmmakers who, for a time, chose the world of low-budget B-films over the more opulent milieu of mainstream, high-profile A-pictures. -allmovie.com Agnès Varda
Top Three Films:
1) Cléo de 5 à 7 [Cléo From 5 to 7]
2) Sans toit ni loi [Vagabond]
3) Le bonheur [Happiness]
Also Worth Noting: Kung-fu master! [Le petit amour] Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Agnès Varda has been called the "Grandmother of the New Wave," a well-meaning if curious tribute for a woman who directed her first feature film at the age of 26... -allmovie.com Paul Verhoeven
Top Three Films: 1) RoboCop 2) Starship Troopers
3) Zwartboek [Black Book]
Also Worth Noting: Total Recall, Soldaat van Oranje [Soldier of Orange]
Verhoeven's work is considered by many violent and misogynistic, but in looking at his films, there is a clear sense not of hatred, but of yearning for a missing piece — of love, passion, memory, or fulfillment — that touches all his creations. His films may not have the warm-fuzzy images that make them easy to digest. He freely admits his films are violent, not for the sake of violence, but, he says, because "...it is my sincere opinion film only reflects the violence of society." Verhoeven is what film buffs want most in a filmmaker, someone who is complicated, an enigma who brings his complexities to the screen. -allmovie.com Дзига Вертов [Dziga Vertov]
DZIGA VERTOV
Top Three Films:
1) Человек с киноаппаратом [Man With a Movie Camera]
2) Кино-глаз [Kinoglaz] Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" 3) Энтузиазм: Симфония Донбасса [Enthusiasm]
Also Worth Noting: Шестая часть мира [A Sixth of the World], Три песни о Ленине [Three Songs About Lenin]
The theories and experimental films of Dziga Vertov revolutionized documentary cinema and continue to influence filmmakers ranging from Godard to Stan Brakhage to Chris Marker. -allmovie.com King Vidor
Top Three Films: 1) The Crowd 2) The Big Parade 3) The Fountainhead
Also Worth Noting: Stella Dallas
"Though Vidor was a versatile director whose finest films include sophisticated comedy (Show People) and poignant melodrama (Stella Dallas), his most typical work is notable for an emotional and visual boldness, later often bordering on bombast...Though Vidor's work was seldom subtle, the vigour and scale of his storytelling and imagery make for enjoyably forthright entertainment." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)
"Informing most of his lasting work is the struggle of Man against Destiny and Nature. In his great silent pictures, The Big Parade and The Crowd, the hero wanders through an anonymous and malevolent environment, war-torn Europe and the American City, respectively...Vidor exercised more control on his films after Our Daily Bread (1934), often serving as producer, but his projects continued to fluctuate between intense metaphysical drama and light-weight comedy and romance." - Michael Selig (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991) Jean Vigo
Top Three Films: Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" 1) L' Atalante 2) À propos de Nice
3) Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collège [Zero for Conduct]
Also Worth Noting: Taris, roi de l'eau [Jean Taris, Swimming Champion]
"Vigo was one of cinema's finest poets, able to transcend mundane reality with his unique blend of lyricism, wit, sensuality and surrealism. His distaste for authority, injustice and inequality was balanced by a love of individuality, innocence and independence...Tragically, he diedat 29, having made only one full-length feature; nevertheless, he remains one of cinema's greatest, most influential masters." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)
"L'Atalante is a masterpiece of mood and characterization, and, along with Zéro de conduite, it guarantees Vigo's status as a great director. But he was not granted that status by the critical community until years after his death. Because of the vagaries of film exhibition and censorship, Vigo was little known while he was making films. He received nowhere near the acclaim given to his contemporaries Jean Renoir and René Clair." - (Eric Smoodin (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991) Luchino Visconti
Top Three Films:
1) Morte a Venezia [Death in Venice]
2) Rocco e i suoi fratelli [Rocco and His Brothers]
3) Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Also Worth Noting: Senso, La caduta degli dei [The Damned]
"The films of Luchino Visconti are among the most stylistically and intellectually influential of postwar Italian cinema. Born a scion of ancient nobility, Visconti integrated the most heterogeneous elements of aristocratic sensibility and taste with a committed Marxist political consciousness, backed by a firm knowledge of Italian class structure...Visconti turned out films steadily but rather slowly from 1942 to 1976. His obsessive care with narrative and filmic materials is apparent in the majority of his films." - Joel Kanoff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"This Italian director offered strong, stern, unremitting portraits of societies, often high, and veneers crumbling under exterior pressures. Most of them are impressive, and beautifully decorated with all the visual elegance of a man who was both set designer and costume designer early in his career. However, after 1960, they have progressively less to offer in terms of entertainment. A trip to a late Visconti film became increasingly an occasion for admiration rather than enjoyment." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999) Josef von Sternberg
Top Three Films:
1) Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] 2) Shanghai Express 3) The Scarlet Empress
Also Worth Noting: The Docks of New York
"There is a sense in which Josef von Sternberg never grew up. In his personality, the twin urges of the disturbed adolescent towards self-advertisement and self-effacement fuse with a brilliant visual imagination to create an artistic vision unparalleled in the cinema...His films reflect a schoolboy's fascination with sensuality and heroics. That they are sublime visual adventures from an artist who contributed substantially to the sum of cinema technique is one paradox to add to the stock that make up his career." - John Baxter (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Best known for the exotic, ironic melodramas he made with Marlene Dietrich, Jonas Sternberg was one of the most personal, ambitious and imaginative of early film-makers. Uninterested in naturalism, and fascinated by film's visual potential, he repeatedly revealed his cynical, detached attitude to the world by focussing attention on male-female obsession, humiliation and cruel, casual betrayal, often by a contemptuous femme Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" fatale." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989) Erich von Stroheim
Top Three Films: 1) Greed 2) The Wedding March 3) Foolish Wives
Also Worth Noting: The Merry Widow
"Only the first two films of the nine directed by Erich von Stroheim (Erich Oswald Stroheim) were released without studio interference. Yet, despite the vandalism committed on his art, he remains one of cinema's great figures...As a director, he was profligate with studio money (for example, he rebuilt a large part of Monte Carlo on the Universal backlot) so that Irving Thalberg, Head of Production, called him a 'footage fetishist.'" - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)
"Like all the great silent directors he knew how necessary it was to abandon taste for obsession. His reckless enlargement of situations was a form of improvisation, even if it entailed crazy expense and delay. Left to himself, Stroheim might never have finished a film, so chronic was the fever for detail. For all that he explored realism of character and delighted in location work, nonetheless he was capable of sudden, exquisite insights - usually into perversion, lust, malice, or pride. His films amassed detail relentlessly, but never lost sight of character or structure." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002) Lars von Trier
Top Three Films: 1) Dogville 2) Dancer in the Dark
3) Idioterne [The Idiots]
Also Worth Noting: ..., Breaking the Waves Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" With a back-story (almost) as singular as his films, Danish director Lars von Trier was one of the most exceptional filmmakers to burst onto the international film scene in the 1990s. Unapologetically confident in his artistry and an unabashed provocateur, von Trier could kick up a fuss about his behavior, but his stylistic brio, extreme narratives, and ability with actors prevented such films as Zentropa (1991), The Kingdom (1994), Breaking the Waves (1996), and Dancer in the Dark (2000) from being eclipsed by their creator. Even as he openly sought a larger audience by making films in English, von Trier's success helped resurrect Scandinavian cinema's international prominence; his intense fear of flying ensured he'd never "go Hollywood." -allmovie.com Andrzej Wajda
Top Three Films:
1) Kanał [Canal]
2) Popiół i diament [Ashes and Diamonds]
3) Niewinni czarodzieje [Innocent Sorcerers]
Also Worth Noting: Człowiek z marmuru [Man of Marble]
A major figure in the world of post-World War II Eastern European cinema, Polish director Andrzej Wajda has chronicled his country's political and social evolution with sensitivity, fervor, and a refusal to make compromises in dealing with his difficult subjects. Once dubbed a symbol for his besieged country, Wajda has repeatedly drawn from Poland's history to suit his tragic sensibility, crafting an oeuvre of work that devastates even as it informs. -allmovie.com Raoul Walsh
Top Three Films: Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" 1) White Heat
2) The Thief of Bagdad [The Thief of Bagdad - An Arabian Nights Fantasy] 3) The Roaring Twenties
Also Worth Noting: They Died With Their Boots On, High Sierra
"Raoul Walsh's extraordinary career spanned the history of the American motion picture industry from its emergence, through its glory years in the 1930s and 1940s, and into the television era. Like his colleagues Allan Dwan, King Vidor, John Ford, and Henry King, whose careers also covered 50 years, Walsh continuously turned out popular fare, including several extraordinary hits...Raoul Walsh is now accepted as an example of a master Hollywood craftsman who worked with naive skill and an animal energy, a director who was both frustrated and buoyed by the studio system." - Douglas Gomery (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"'Action!', the word that starts the cameras rolling, sums up the career of this American director. Sprawling, brawling, often almost primitive action, teeming across the screen, marks Walsh's stories of comradeship and battles against the odds. He had a talent for making the densest of action sequences seem uncomplicated and uncluttered and his characters, like the scenes they distinguished, often have a raw, unfettered power." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999) Andy Warhol
Top Three Films: 1) Chelsea Girls 2) Blow Job 3) Vinyl
Also Worth Noting: Poor Little Rich Girl
American pop artist Andy Warhol became a pop icon himself, symbolizing the wild decadence of the "beautiful people" of the 1970s. After gaining notoriety for his pop-art renditions of things such as Campbell's Soup cans and silk screens of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol began making experimental films during the early '60s. Most of his early works were little more than passive chronicles of the ordinary. For example, in the film Sleep, he simple recorded a man sleeping for several hours. Such endeavors were heralded as groundbreaking by other experimental filmmakers, but the public and most critics generally regarded them as wastes of film, and Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" their time. Still, Warhol continued making these plotless films until he eventually began adding crude soundtracks and sketchy scripts. Many of these films are filled with his "players": the beautiful people, "freaks," and wealthy dilettantes that constantly surrounded the artist and his "Factory," an art studio he founded in 1962. His films became a form of cinéma vérité, a voyeur's delight of strange people doing equally strange things. -allmovie.com Orson Welles
Top Three Films: 1) Citizen Kane 2) Touch of Evil
3) Vérités et mensonges [F for Fake]
Also Worth Noting: The Lady From Shanghai, The Magnificent Ambersons
"It is almost tragically ironic that George Orson Welles, without doubt one of the greatest filmmakers ever, was forced to work for most of his career under the most adverse of conditions. Such were his genius and ambition that his films, years ahead of their time, still astonish by their inventiveness, stylistic virtuosity and freshness; while the widely held view that he never fulfilled his early promise fails to take account of the thematic and moral consistency of his work, not to say its restless experimentalism." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
"People should cross themselves when they say his name." - Marlene Dietrich William A. Wellman
Top Three Films: 1) The Ox-Bow Incident 2) The Public Enemy 3) Beau Geste
Also Worth Noting: Wings Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" "Although William Wellman's name is most often associated with action pictures, gaining him a reputation for working mainly with men, he brought his expertise to bear on a range of genres in the best Hollywood manner. Wellman earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his impatience with actors, his devil-may-care personality, and his spell as a pilot in World War I." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)
"Wellman was an efficient, erratic journeyman, as good as his material. Though praised for his handling of vigorous masculine action in war movies (Wings, The Story of GI Joe), thrillers (The Public Enemy), westerns and outdoor adventures (Beggars of Life, Wild Boys of the Road), he was at his best with dark satire and melodrama, where his cynicism about modern mores enhanced sparkling scripts by Dorothy Parker (A Star is Born), Ben Hecht (Nothing Sacred), and Nunnally Johnson (Roxie Hart)." - Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999) Wim Wenders
Top Three Films:
1) Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] 2) Paris, Texas
3) Alice in den Städten [Alice in the Cities]
Also Worth Noting: Der amerikanische Freund [The American Friend], Der Stand der Dinge [The State of Things]
"Of all the new German directors of the 1970s, none had Wim Wenders's rhapsodic sense of America. He was brought up on American Forces radio and the glut of Hollywood movies that occupied Germany after the war...Wenders remains romantically itinerant, in love with music, America, and the idea of the movies." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
"A fan of American films from his early childhood...He began his career as a critic before developing into one of the leading exponents of the New German Cinema. Themes of isolation and alienation characterize his films, which often feature journeys in search of enlightenment." - (Chambers Film Factfinder, 2006) James Whale Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Top Three Films: 1) Frankenstein 2) Bride of Frankenstein 3) The Old Dark House
Also Worth Noting: The Invisible Man
"If any director can be said to have found beauty in horror, then it was the British-born James Whale. An enigmatic character, Whale was 40 before he came to Hollywood, but he made four classics of the horror-genre there. These were Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein. Whale was just as effective with dark, unstated horror as with delicate, terrifyingly chilling scenes that had one on the edge of one's seat lest they should fade to black, and scenes of freakish grey horror comedy." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)
"He is best remembered for his four stylish horror films...excellent examples of the genre, noted for their semi-expressionist mood and understated black humor. But he also directed refined and intelligent films in other genres, usually adaptations from literature or the stage, marked by the same fluid camera movement, leisurely pace, emphasis on detail, and discriminating restraint that characterized his more famous horror pictures." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994) Billy Wilder
Top Three Films: 1) Sunset Blvd. 2) The Apartment 3) Double Indemnity
Also Worth Noting: Ace in the Hole
One of Hollywood's most consistent and enduring filmmakers, Billy Wilder was also among its most daring. In feature after feature, in a wide variety of styles and genres, he explored the taboo subjects of the day with insight, wit, and trenchant cynicism; adultery, alcoholism, prostitution — no topic was too controversial or too racy for Wilder's films. Unlike the majority of Hollywood's other historically provocative voices, however, he was a major commercial success as well as a critical favorite, with two of his features garnering Best Picture Oscars and numerous others honored with various Academy nominations. Sophisticated and acerbic, his Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" intricate narratives, sparkling dialogue, and painterly visuals combined to illuminate the darker impulses of modern American society with rare brilliance.-allmovie.com Robert Wise
Top Three Films: 1) The Day the Earth Stood Still 2) The Haunting 3) The Sound of Music
Also Worth Noting: The Set-Up, West Side Story
"After directing a number of routine B pictures in the late 40s, Wise made what many consider the best boxing drama ever filmed, The Set-Up (1949), a mercilessly candid portrait of the seedy world of the professional ring...Wise followed this in the 50s with such high quality films as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Executive Suite, Somebody Up There Likes Me, I Want to Live and, Odds Against Tomorrow." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
"A much maligned director who has a good pictorial sense and the ability to integrate a hint of realism and an interest in social issues into all types of projects." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) 王家衛 [Wong Kar-wai]
Top Three Films:
1) 花樣年華 [In the Mood for Love]
2) 重慶森林 [Chungking Express]
3) 堕落天使 [Fallen Angels] Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Also Worth Noting: 春光乍洩 [Happy Together]
While a product of the fertile Hong Kong filmmaking community of the '90s, writer/director Wong Kar-Wai did not traffic in the over-the-top action blowouts favored by the likes of John Woo and Tsui Hark. Instead, his films took their inspiration from the seminal work of Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave, painting idiosyncratic and romantic tales of the young and disenfranchised uniquely representative of the myriad cultural influences which distinguish his native land. -allmovie.com 吳宇森 [John Woo]
Top Three Films:
1) 喋血雙雄 [The Killer] 2) Face/Off
3) 喋血街頭 [Bullet in the Head]
Also Worth Noting: 辣手神探 [Hard Boiled]
The first Asian filmmaker to helm a major Hollywood feature, John Woo initially emerged as the leading light of the Hong Kong action renaissance of the late '80s. Celebrated for his unique, much-imitated style — a Molotov cocktail of graceful slow-motion sequences, staccato edits, freeze-frames, and dissolves — Woo brought a new depth of emotion and visual beauty to the action genre, perfecting an operatic, highly stylized brand of mayhem laced with melodrama, savage wit, and homoerotic undercurrents. -allmovie.com William Wyler
Top Three Films: Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" 1) The Best Years of Our Lives 2) Roman Holiday 3) The Little Foxes
Also Worth Noting: Ben-Hur
"Much of Wyler's work is centered on characters who are severely repressed, then give themselves over to their passions (Dodsworth, 36; The Letter, 40; The Collector, 65). The cause and effect are usually examined by the director, a fact which accounts for the high quality of Wyler's pulsating melodramas. In the course of his films, there are invariably images which brilliantly summarize a relationship or a moment." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)
"Wyler's films ... are full of ringing, decisive and memorable emotional moments, and sharply etched acting performances. Most of the public, too, liked what they were seeing: it was crafted for their benefit with such care and attention to detail that the director at one time became known as '90-Take Wyler' for the number of times he would re-shoot his scenes to get exactly the right effect." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors, 1999) 杨德昌 [Edward Yang]
Top Three Films:
1) 一一 [Yi Yi: A One and a Two]
2) 牯嶺街少年殺人事件 [A Brighter Summer Day]
3) 恐怖份子 [The Terrorizers]
Also Worth Noting: 青梅竹馬 [Taipei Story] Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema" Though largely unknown in the West, Edward Yang emerged, over the course of two decades, as one of international cinema's most distinctive voices and, along with Hou Hsiao Hsien, one of Taiwan's finest filmmakers. -allmovie.com Robert Zemeckis
Top Three Films: 1) Back to the Future 2) Who Framed Roger Rabbit 3) Contact
Also Worth Noting: Forrest Gump
...It was Spielberg who lined up Zemeckis' first directing job, the 1977 comedy/nostalgia blend I Wanna Hold Your Hand; despite the film's low budget, it demonstrated Zemeckis' ability to combine credible live-action sequences with elaborate special effects devices...-allmovie.com Fred Zinnemann
Top Three Films: 1) High Noon 2) The Day of the Jackal 3) A Man for All Seasons
Also Worth Noting: The Sundowners, From Here to Eternity, Julia
...Zinnemann's handling of From Here to Eternity solidified his reputation as one of Hollywood's most reliable hands at dealing with difficult screen material. Comfortable in most genres, Zinnemann subsequently excelled in musicals (Oklahoma!), adaptations of stage work (A Man for All Seasons, for which he won another Oscar), and thrillers (Day of the Jackal). Along with Billy Wilder, Zinnemann represented the most successful of expatriate European directors in Hollywood. -allmovie.com Chantal Akerman
Top Three Films: 1) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 2) News From Home 3) Les rendez-vous d'Anna [The Meetings of Anna]
Also Worth Noting: Nuit et jour [Night and Day]
"At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity." - Lillian Schiff (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist narratives and static visual style...Her films, often dramatically vague and nearly plotless, typically seek to explore human emotion and character through unorthodox cinematic means. Although she is admired by serious critics, her films are barely accessible to general audiences." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
Robert Aldrich
Top Three Films: 1) Kiss Me Deadly 2) The Dirty Dozen 3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Also Worth Noting: The Longest Yard
An artistic maverick whose reputation in the United States did not match his prestige in Europe, Robert Aldrich directed some of Hollywood's more intense examinations of violence, morality, and survival during the 1950s and '60s. -allmovie.com
"At his best, Aldrich employed vicious irony, muscular acting and vivid, sophisticated compositions to evoke a world divided by self-interest and forever on the verge of violent anarchy." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
Woody Allen
Top Three Films: 1) Manhattan 2) Annie Hall 3) Hannah and Her Sisters
Also Worth Noting: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Woody Allen redefined film comedy during the 1970s, bringing a new measure of sophistication and personal complexity to the form. His movies — intimate meditations on recurring subjects such as art, religion, and romance — put a knowing, confessional spin on the anxieties of contemporary audiences, telescoping their fears and concerns through his own mordantly neurotic onscreen persona. Drawing universal insight from the traditions of Yiddish humor, Allen established himself both as a comic Everyman and one of American filmmaking's true auteurs, writing and directing features which broke with established narrative conventions and infused the screen-comedy form with unprecedented substance and depth. - allmovie.com
Pedro Almodóvar
Top Three Films: 1) Todo sobre mi madre [All About My Mother] 2) Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] 3) Volver [Return]
Also Worth Noting: Carne trémula [Live Flesh]
Splashing his colorful films across the dour post-Franco Spanish landscape with the irreverent glee of a prostitute arriving late to church after a long night, Pedro Almodóvar has been called the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel. Beginning in the 1980s, Almodóvar started serving up provocative, candy-colored visions fraught with postmodernist insight into everything from sex and violence to religion and the dangers of good gazpacho. Sometimes shocking, sometimes controversial, Almodóvar's films have always managed to present a new and intriguing view of his native country, shaping the attitudes of both his compatriots and a larger international audience. -allmovie.com
Robert Altman
Top Three Films: 1) Nashville 2) McCabe & Mrs. Miller 3) The Player
Also Worth Noting: Short Cuts, MASH
During the 1970s, an era widely recognized as a renaissance period of American moviemaking, few directors enjoyed greater prominence than Robert Altman. An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman's quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. -allmovie.com
Paul Thomas Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) Boogie Nights 2) There Will Be Blood 3) Magnolia
Also Worth Noting: Punch-Drunk Love
With his 1997 film Boogie Nights, then-27-year-old director Paul Thomas Anderson took his place on the list of Hollywood wunderkinds. A brash, ensemble-driven epic made as a tribute to the Los Angeles porn industry of the 1970s, the film was both an exploration of the industry and the '70s version of the American dream. Combining sharp humor, indelible poignancy, and painstaking detail, Boogie Nights was hailed by one critic as the first great film about the '70s to come out since the '70s. The wide acclaim surrounding it — as well as Anderson's Best Screenplay Oscar nomination — put Anderson at the forefront of young American filmmakers, establishing him as one of the most exciting talents to come along in years. -allmovie.com
Wes Anderson
Top Three Films: 1) The Royal Tenenbaums 2) Rushmore 3) Fantastic Mr. Fox
Also Worth Noting: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Bolstered by the support of veteran director James L. Brooks and producer Polly Platt, Wes Anderson attained a status in the late 1990s that most young filmmakers only dream of achieving — he proved that he could work within the Hollywood studio system and still create distinctive, willfully quirky films infused with an independent sensibility. -allmovie.com
Kenneth Anger
Top Three Films: 1) Scorpio Rising 2) Fireworks 3) Rabbit's Moon
Also Worth Noting: Kustom Kar Kommandos, Eaux d'artifice
Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative. In many ways, these wordless films represent the resurgence and development of the uniquely cinematic qualities widely considered retarded or destroyed by the passing of the silent era, especially in the area of editing. According to Tony Rayns, “Anger has an amazing instinctive grasp of all the elements of filmmaking; his films actively work out much of Eisenstein's theoretical writing about the cinema…. [Anger] comes nearer [to Eisenstein's theories] than anything in commercial cinema and produces film-making as rich in resonance as anything of Eisenstein's own.” - Maximilian Le Cain; "Senses of Cinema"