This is a list of my 100 favorite directors of all time. This is an ever changing list, but this is the list as of December 2025.
This was not an easy list to make, for many reasons. It's much harder to rank entire bodies of work than it is to rank individual films. The difference in the size of the filmographies, shifting styles over time for each director, and the acknowledgment of other contributing artists to each work makes any kind of broad statement about directors difficult. I had many people question then why I was making this list the way I chose to make it. Why not make it shorter or make it an unranked list? And the…
This is a list of my 100 favorite directors of all time. This is an ever changing list, but this is the list as of December 2025.
This was not an easy list to make, for many reasons. It's much harder to rank entire bodies of work than it is to rank individual films. The difference in the size of the filmographies, shifting styles over time for each director, and the acknowledgment of other contributing artists to each work makes any kind of broad statement about directors difficult. I had many people question then why I was making this list the way I chose to make it. Why not make it shorter or make it an unranked list? And the answer is I'm not entirely sure. I like Top 100 Lists and I like ranking things. I think my main goal here with this list then is to simply mark broad trends for myself. To see what it is about particular directors that appeals to me and how that will change over time. Like with any of my Top 100 Lists, I will be keeping meticulous notes as to how the list changes over the years because that's more interesting to me than the list itself.
I did have a few self-imposed rules here. The big one is that I will only be considering directors who I have seen three unconnected feature films from. This excludes shows and short films, meaning directors like Don Hertzfeldt and Adam Elliott are excluded. This is in place to ensure a certain level of consistency. With only one film, it's hard to have a good gauge of a director's style, so I settled on three as the base line. This also excludes directors whom I have mostly seen films from a single franchise for, excluding directors like The Wachowskis. This was done to limit the sway franchises would have on the list.
The notes for each films names the director and lists the films of theirs I've seen, along with scores for each film and any significant lists those films are included on. This includes any Top 100 lists, if I included them as a Golden Hourglass Best Picture Nominee, or if I included them on my core list.
These directors hail from 27 countries:
United States: 67
United Kingdoms: 7
Japan: 7
Germany: 6
Canada: 4
France: 3
U.S.S.R.: 3
Sweden: 2
Russia: 2
Greece: 2
Italy: 2
Taiwan: 2
South Korea: 2
Mexico: 2
Australia: 2
Austria: 1
Denmark: 1
Hungary: 1
Poland: 1
Czechoslovakia: 1
Lithuania: 1
Hong Kong: 1
Malaysia: 1
Belgium: 1
Guatemala: 1
India: 1
The earliest born director on this list is Victor Sjöström who was born in 1879. The latest born director on this list is Ari Aster who was born in 1986. The following is a breakdown of the directors by birth decade:
1870s: 1
1880s: 8
1890s: 10
1900s: 6
1910s: 7
1920s: 9
1930s: 8
1940s: 11
1950s: 6
1960s: 21
1970s: 10
1980s: 3
The director with the earliest debut on this list is Michael Curtiz who had his directorial debut in 1912 with Today and Tomorrow. The director with the latest debut on this list is Ari Aster who had his directorial debut in 2018 with Hereditary. The following is a breakdown of the directors by their debut decade:
1910s: 11
1920s: 7
1930s: 6
1940s: 6
1950s: 8
1960s: 13
1970s: 7
1980s: 12
1990s: 20
2000s: 7
2010s: 3
53 of these directors are still alive, The earliest death on this list is F. W. Murnau who died in 1931. The latest death on this list is David Lynch who died in 2025. The following is a breakdown of the directors by their death date.
1930s: 1
1940s: 1
1950s: 3
1960s: 6
1970s: 6
1980s: 10
1990s: 6
2000s: 6
2010s: 7
2020s: 1
Alive: 53
These directors have earned a cumulative 147 Oscar nominations for Best Director, with William Wyler earning the most with 12, and 37 wins, with John Ford winning the most with 4.
There are 14 Asian directors, 4 Hispanic directors, and 1 black director on this list. There are 4 women on this list. All four of these women are white.
Essentially, this list is overwhelmingly white men. I fully acknowledge this. That's absolutely a failure on my part. There are many women directors and directors of color who I have yet to really delve into that I absolutely want to. I've listed several in the honorable mentions below. Much of this failure can be attributed to the way I watch films. For example, a lot of the films I watch are from the Criterion Collection or were Oscar nominees due to the two challenges I do every year. Both of these groups are dominated by white male directors. But I am always looking to expand my tastes, so please, if there are any women directors or directors of color who are not on this list, feel free to recommend them in the comments.
Honorable Mentions:
- Don Hertzfeldt
- Adam Elliott
- Martin Rosen
- Satoshi Kon
- Naoko Yamada
- Marcell Jankovics
- Kazuo Hara
- D. A. Pennebaker
- Frederick Wiseman
- Sergio Corbucci
- Pamela Yates
- Edson Oda
- Peter Weir
- Lee Chang-dong
- Mike Mills
- Miranda July
- Joe Lynch
- Marlon Riggs
- G.W. Pabst
- Sion Sono
- Gregory La Cava
- Megan Park
- Brian Duffield
- Kogonada
- Jane Schoenbrun
- Emma Seligman
- Thomas Vinterberg
- Béla Tarr
- Peter Bogdanovich
- Yevgeni Bauer
- Chuck Jones
- Georges Méliès
- Robert Clampett
- Władysław Starewicz
- Dave Fleischer
- Jonni Peppers
- The Wachowski Sisters
- Fritz Freleng
- Winsor McKay
- Charles Laughton
- Nora Twomey
- Giovanni Pastrone
- Karel Zeman
