3. Sergio Leone
Suspense is often associated with Alfred Hitchcock and for a good reason. However, Leone took it one step ahead showing how to do something more with that suspense. By stretching the tension way beyond the obvious and solving it with an explosion of adrenaline, he created some of the most thrilling scenes the world has ever seen.
Unlike Fincher and Aronofsky who made their best work quite early in their careers, Leone is a director who didn't stop getting better.
He started by doing swords-and-sandals movies with The Last Days of Pompeii (which was originally directed by Mario Bonnard, who fell ill before finishing shooting) and his first full credited work: The Colossus of Rhodes. Though he shows some abilities here that would made him universally known as a genius later, the Colossus of Rhodes is not exactly a masterpiece.
It's in 1964, with the first film of the Dollars trilogy, A Fistfull of Dollars, that he makes his first big impact. The movie is usually considered the first important spaghetti western, a subgenre that would be immensely proliferous during the next 10 years. The movie was also the first collaboration between Leone and Clint Eastwood, on the role of the Man with No Name, and more importantly the first collaboration between Leone and the musical genius of Ennio Morricone, in my opinion the best duo in the history of cinema.
After the Dollars Trilogy - finishing with the famous The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - he directed 2 more spaghetti westerns: Once Upon a Time in the West, one of my favourite movies of all time, and Duck, You Sucker who created shock at the time of its release because of the last scene - a poetic and metaphoric threesome.
His last and most ambitious film is Once Upon a Time in America, my favourite gangster movie of all time, and a tremendous masterpiece with a full lenght of almost 4 hours.
Sergio Leone is one of the most influential directors of all time, playing a big part on the work of a lot of modern director especially Quentin Tarantino.
How I rate his movies:
Il Colosso di Rodi (1961) +
Per un Pugno di Dollari (1964)
Per qualche Dollaro in pił (1965) +
Il buono, il brutto,il cattivo (1966)
C'era una volta il West (1968)
Gił la Testa (1971) -
Once Upon a Time in America