Best Director of Each Decade

Cronenberg, Miike, Fincher, Scorsese, Scott, Vaughn, Spielberg, Sodebergh, Eastwood.

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Fair enough. It's too soon to judge, is my point. Well, winter's.

Good point. That is why I said the verdict is out first. We still have a few more years to go see who the director of the decade is. The Dark Knight Rises could end up being a bad movie (I don;t think it will be good myself).

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Going 18600 miles per second.

My point was Inception wasn't the best film of the last two and half years

Apologies to those I accidently repped and those I accidently negged..computer is playing up. Don't suppose I can take those negs/reps back now?

1920s: Buster Keaton

Honorable mentions: Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang

1930s: Ernst Lubitsch

Honorable mentions: Todd Browning, Fritz Lang

1940s: Preston Sturges

Honorable mentions: Howard Hawks, The Archers

1950s: Alfred Hitchcock

Honorable mentions: Nicholas Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Billy Wilder

1960s: Sergio Leone

Honorable mentions: Jean-Pierre Melville, Ingmar Bergman

1970s: Francis Ford Coppola

Honorable mentions: Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman

1980s: Steven Spielberg

Honorable mentions: Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen

1990s: Michael Mann

Honorable mentions: Joel & Ethan Coen, Martin Scorsese

2000s: Quentin Tarantino

Honorable mentions: Pedro Almodovar, David Fincher


Ask me tomorrow, it'll probably look very different.

Yoda might fix 'em up if you ask him. Otherwise, you can always balance them out the way they should go at other posts.

Re: Brod's post, I find it relatively accurate and interesting. However, I would mention Murnau in the '20s, Capra and Curtiz in the '30s, John Huston in the '40s, Joseph L. Mankiewicz from the late '40s to the early '50s, David Lean somewhere, Richard Brooks (maybe the '60s - a personal fave), etc. The main problem is trying to pigeonhole someone into a decade. C'mon, it's impossible to limit Hitchcock, Kubrick, Huston, Wilder, Scorsese, Spielberg, Almodovar, Bergman, etal into a decade.

But I suppose it's kinda fun and also an intellectual exercise. It just leaves out too many greats.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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50's: Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, North By Northwest). Runner-up: Akira Kurosawa.

60's: Stanley Kubrick (Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey). Runner-up: Sergio Leone

70's: Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now). Runner-ups: Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg.

80's: Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones Trilogy, Empire Of The Sun, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial). Runner-ups: Martin Scorsese, Robert Zemeckis.

90's: Martin Scorsese (GoodFellas, Cape Fear, Casino). Runner-ups: David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson.

00's: David Fincher (Zodiac, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button). Runner-ups: Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese.

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"George, this is a little too much for me. Escaped convicts, fugitive sex... I've got a cockfight to focus on."

You know who might actually rule the 10s? Wes Anderson. Moonrise Kingdom was agreat film. And his next film is starring Johnny Depp and may have Owen Wilson (his usual choice of actors), Bill Murray (one of his other usual choice of actors), Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, William Dafore, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law and Angela Lansbury.

Not bad for an "Indie" director.

Oh absolutely. On the whole, Scorsese has an all-time great career in directing, probably top 5 material. But simply because the thread's title is 'best director of each decade', he gets beaten out imo by directors who had a better decade, although Scorsese probably outdoes (nearly) all of them in terms of overall career achievements.

The ones I feel really strongly about are Preston Sturges, Sergio Leone and F.F. Coppola.

Sturges created a remarkable body of work in an extremely short period of time. To me, his writing stands out more than his directing, although he was also a masterful director. I'm not one for laugh-out loud moments during films, but Sturges' films at the very least never cease to make me smile, chuckle or even laugh out loud. The dialogue is magnificent and rewards repeated viewings.

Leone created four all-time great westerns in the 60s. Each and every one of them are excellent films, two of them not only being among the very best in their genre, but among the best of any genre.

Coppola did no less than Leone did in the previous decade, creating 4 timeless masterpieces, as a body of work probably even stronger than what Leone did.

If I'd had to rank 'em:

1. Coppola
2. Leone
3. Sturges
4. Spielberg
5. Hitchcock
6. Tarantino
7. Lubitsch
8. Keaton
9. Mann

Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, George Romero, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, George Lucas, Clint Eastwood, Sam Raimi, and Robert Zemeckis are some of my favorite movie directors.

My choices

30's- Capra
40's- Hitchcock/Huston
50's- Hitchcock
60's- Leone
70's- Coppola
80's- Hughes
90's- Scorsese/Tarantino
00's- Nolan

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When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher's knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross!

I change my pick for who is the best of the 2010s so far. David Fincher thus far. The Social Network and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were both great films.

90's - James Cameron or Speilberg
00's - Sofia Coppola

I wasn't able to pick just one for a couple of these:

00s: Michael Haneke.
90s: Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai.
80s: David Lynch, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Woody Allen.
70s: Andrei Tarkovsky.
60s: Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard.
50s: Akira Kurosawa.
40s: John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger.

I really haven't seen enough beyond the 40s, to be too definitive.

30s: ~
20s: Buster Keaton.
10s: ~

00s: Bong Joon-ho, Darren Aronofsky
90s: Abbas Kiarostami, The Coen Brothers
80s: Peter Greenaway, Hou Hsiao Hsien
70s: Robert Altman
60s: Stanley Kubrick
50s: Akira Kurosawa
40s: Howard Hawks
30s: Ernst Lubitsch

I think Mankiewicz for the fifties is a good choice. I quite like Michael Powell for the forties. John Hughes is very much associated with the eighties.

Really it has to be judged on when directors made their best output.

60s - Sergio Leone
70s - Francis Ford Coppola & Stanley Kubrick
80s - James Cameron & Steven Spielberg
90s - Martin Scorsese
00s - Quentin Tarantino & Christopher Nolan. I give a mention to Zack Snyder: He's not as big as these two but in my opinion he's one of the really good directors of this decade.

80's and 90's-Spielberg
Last Decade-Nolan

Very,very difficult question........

30's-Charlie Chaplin (City Lights,Modern Times)

40's-Roberto Rosselini (Rome Open city,Paisan,Germany Year zero)

50's-Akira kurosawa (Rashomon,Seven Samurai)

60's-Federico Fellini ( La Dolce Vita , 8 1/2)

70's-Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather,Apocalypse Now)

80's-John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Planes,trains and automobiles)

90's- Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs,Pulp Fiction)