Although it is just plain fun to rank a director's movies, it may also help me think about the director's oeuvre of work as a whole. Comparisons can help me to discover elements of film that I am drawn to, what the director finds value in revealing through their movies and possibly how the director has grown artistically.
Above all, the most distinct Campion touch to me, is presenting humans as richly complex with deep inner lives who are capable of behaving reactionary, strangely, even hypocritically as their basic desires and perceptions of who they are and/or want to be mix and clash in astonishingly human ways. Campion's filmmaking and writing can thus also feel messy as her films are…
Although it is just plain fun to rank a director's movies, it may also help me think about the director's oeuvre of work as a whole. Comparisons can help me to discover elements of film that I am drawn to, what the director finds value in revealing through their movies and possibly how the director has grown artistically.
Above all, the most distinct Campion touch to me, is presenting humans as richly complex with deep inner lives who are capable of behaving reactionary, strangely, even hypocritically as their basic desires and perceptions of who they are and/or want to be mix and clash in astonishingly human ways. Campion's filmmaking and writing can thus also feel messy as her films are populated with messy characters who respond in unpredictable ways or display behaviors that seem pretty extreme.
Campion also often makes movies that deal with how people's natural desires, often sex, intertwine with their power and influence over others. These strong forces within her characters cause them to conflict with one another in both beautiful and terrible ways, which again showcase the mess humans make for each other as they wield their power over other in self-serving ways.
Most of Campion's protagonists are females and I think she really does embrace a feminine way of understanding the world and telling stories that emphasize a different kind of logic than what we may be used to in a male-dominated society. Several of her movies reveal the inherent conflict between men and women, as well as the shared bond women can have with one other in both supportive and destructive forms.
Other directors I have ranked:
JJ Abrams | PT Anderson | Wes Anderson | Judd Apatow | Darren Aronofsky | Ari Aster | Sean Baker | Bong Joon-ho | Charlie Chaplin | Damien Chazelle | Coen Brothers | Sofia Coppola | Cameron Crowe | Andrew Dominik | Robert Eggers | David Fincher | Alex Garland | Greta Gerwig | Todd Haynes | Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu | Jim Jarmusch | Rian Johnson | Spike Jonze | Satoshi Kon | Stanley Kubrick | Sergio Leone | Richard Linklater | George Lucas | David Lynch | Martin McDonagh | Steve McQueen | Sam Mendes | Nancy Meyers |Hayao Miyazaki | Jeff Nichols | Christopher Nolan | Alexander Payne | Sarah Polley | Lynn Ramsay | Céline Sciamma | Ben Stiller | Quentin Tarantino | Andrei Tarkovsky | Taika Waititi | Edgar Wright | Chloé Zhao
