100 DIRECTORS' ESSENTIAL FILMS
di Kenji
Do click on Read More and the links. Thanks to all following this surprisingly popular list of important, critically admired and well known directors- with some personal wild cards (Monteiro, Peries, Pilger) for good measure. A pantheon first, alphabetically from Bergman to Welles, folllowed by various other big names, also alphabetically, the rest in changing order. Of course in time more women will be included (the only two so far are both from Belgium, land of my heroine Andrée Dumon). Modern directors will be more prominent too, and I expect more from Latin America, neglected countries and regions.
Anyway, the 100 are:
Akerman
Allen
Almodovar
Altman
Anderson (P.T)
Anderson (W)
Angelopoulos
Antonioni
Bergman
Bertolucci
Bong
Bresson
Bunuel
Cameron
Capra
Cassavetes
Ceylan
Chaplin
Coen bros
Coppola
Dardenne bros
De Sica
Diaz
Dreyer
Eisenstein
Fassbinder
Fellini
Ford
Godard
Griffith
Haneke
Hawks
Herzog
Hitchcock
Hou
Huston
Imamura
Keaton
Kiarostami
Kieslowski
Kobayashi
Kore-eda
Kubrick
Kurosawa
Lang
Lean
Lee (Spike)
Leone
Loach
Lubitsch
Lynch
Malick
Malle
Marker
Melville
Miyazaki
Mizoguchi
Monteiro
Murnau
Naruse
Oliveira
Ophuls
Ozu
Pasolini
Peries
Pilger
Polanski
Powell
Ray (N)
Ray (S)
Renoir
Resnais
Rivette
Rohmer
Rossellini
Ruiz
Scorsese
Scott
Sembene
Sirk
Spielberg
Sternberg
Tarantino
Tarkovsky
Tarr
Tourneur
Truffaut
Varda
Vertov
Visconti
Von Trier
Weerasethakul
Welles
Wenders
Wilder
Wong
Wyler
Yang
Yoshida
Zhang
Bubbling under: Argento, Borzage, Brakhage, Burton, Campion, Carné,, Cissé, Clair, Clouzot, Cocteau, Cronenberg, Cuaron, Cukor, Curtiz, Dang, Demy, Denis, De Palma, Eastwood,, Erice, Farhadi, Feuillade, Forman, Gerima, Ghatak, Greenaway, Hong, Ichikawa, Inarritu, Iosseliani, Ivens, Jackson, Jancso, Jarmusch, Jia, Chuck Jones, Kaul, Kaurismaki, Kawase, Kazan, Kitano, Robert Kramer, Leigh, Linklater, Lumet, Martel, Mendes, Minnelli, Nolan, Olmi, Marcel Ophuls, Oshima, Paradjanov, Peckinpah, Reed, Rocha, Sanjines, Sciamma, Sen, Shimizu, Sjostrom, Sokurov, Stone, Preston Sturges, Tati,, Tsai, Vidor, Vigo, Villeneuve, Vlacil, Von Stroheim, Wajda, Wiseman, Zanussi, Zinnemann, Zulawski….
The films i’ve chosen to represent the little known Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries have had high average scores but relatively few ratings. Do see his films if you can. The Life of an Actor and A Woman of Osaka, regarded at the time as among Mizoguchi’s finest, are lost.
See also my lists Directors A-Z , Essential Films by Women, Notable Films by Black Directors, Japanese Directors, and by Welsh directors.
and on individual directors:
Mizoguchi Revered
Directors Round Mizoguchi
Tarkovsky’s Legacy
Films Admired by Tarkovsky
Satyajit Ray
Le Cinéma, c’est Jean Renoir
Essential Hitchcock
Essential Kubrick
Essential Godard
Essential Bergman
Essential Bunuel
Lester James Peries, hidden master
Yoshida
Eric Rohmer
John Pilger
The Liberation of Raul Ruiz
Joris Ivens
Quay brothers
The Essential Agnes Varda
Alice Guy-Blaché, Queen of the Pioneers
The Best of Wim Wenders
Gaston Kaboré
Greenaway A-Z
~
My favourite list-maker on Mubi is Apursansar, who is extremely knowledgeable and always up on recent films from round the world, and an expert on Latin American, Indian and German films in particular.
Some other lists I’ve done:
Kenji’s Canon: The Big 1000
My Favourite Films
The Japanese Canon
Pastel Films
The Labyrinth
The Kenji Awards
The Mubi/Auteurs World Cup Films (thanks to all who helped that groundbreaking event work)
The Welsh Connection
Let there be Light: The Birth of Films
Animation
Short Films
A Rosefinch Sang: the Czechoslovakian New Wave
19th Century Britain
Portugal, Land of my Dreams
A Library of Film Books
Essential French Films
The Silent Era: 1888-1929
The Best of British
Hidden Treasures
Mali
Tumbleweed and Tomahawks
The Caucasus
Spain: Mystery, Passion, Life
Canada: A Collection of Contraband Curiosities
An Exquisite Soirée at Baron Kenjitski’s Magnificent Chateau
Romanticism
Great Cinematographers
Painters and Films
Mental Illness
Essential African Films
Essential Hungarian Films
Poland
Kazakhstan
Nepal
Belgium
They Do Not Exist: Palestine
Lesotho
Double Bills