The World’s 40 Best Directors

The Guardian compiles a list of the world’s 40 best directors. Personally, I don’t fully agree with their list, and there are many cited directors whose works I’m not familiar with, but here’s how it goes according to them:

1. David Lynch
2. Martin Scorsese
3. Joel and Ethan Coen
4. Steven Soderbergh
5. Terrence Malick
6. Abbas Kiarostami
7. Errol Morris
8. Hayao Miyazaki
9. David Cronenberg
10. Terence Davies


11. Lukas Moodysson
12. Lynne Ramsay
13. Bela Tarr
14. Wong Kar-wai
15. Pedro Almodovar
16. Todd Haynes
17. Quentin Tarantino
18. Tsai Ming-Liang
19. Aki Kaurismaki
20. Michael Winterbottom
21. Paul Thomas Anderson
22. Michael Haneke
23. Walter Salles
24. Alexander Payne
25. Spike Jonze
26. Aleksandr Sokurov
27. Ang Lee
28. Michael Moore
29. Wes Anderson
30. Takeshi Kitano
31. Richard Linklater
32. Gaspar No

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Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.

4 thoughts on “The World’s 40 Best Directors”

  1. At first I thought there are lot of better directors missing from this list, lot of french an italian directors for example, and classic american ones, Stanley Kubrick is the first to come to my mind…

    Then I get it, it is not the 40 best film-makers, but “the film-makers who are leading the way“. That makes sense, these are people who are still alive 🙂 While the list misses some great new wave american directors like Spike Lee, Kevin Smith, Sophia Coppola, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and (one of my favorites) Richard Kelly, it still lists the best of the best I think.

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