I'm sure I'll probably be one of the few who thinks this man is overrated, but my pick is Robert Altman. I like to lose myself in a movie, and in most of the ones I've seen I lose my concentration. Whether it was Altman's fault or his cameraman's (maybe they were one and the same?), he/they had an irritating habit of suddenly zooming in on an actor's face while a certain point was being made, kind of hitting you over the head with it.

I can think of a certain scene in Brewster McCloud where Shelley Duvall pukes (and you can see her plainly do it from a bit of a distance) and then immediately kisses a man. Altman chooses this moment as if to say, "Hey, look what she's doing!" by zooming in on them real fast. There's a scene in The Player where he zooms in on Julia Robert's face when she's smiling for some reason. Other times he has things happen for seemingly no reason, like most of the models coming out nude on the runway at the end of Prêt-à-Porter (at least no reason I can remember). And the totally boring, befuddling Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bill's History Lesson.

This is not to say that I dislike all his movies because, in truth, I haven't seen them all. But his quick-zoom and seeming pretentiousness, like at the end of Prêt-à-Porter, during almost all of Short Cuts just really turn me off to his work. That said, I still want to see Gosford Park because a lot of people seem to really like it and it seems like it would be up my alley. Can anyone recommend it?