100 DIRECTORS' ESSENTIAL FILMS

Do click on Read More and the links. Thanks to all following this surprisingly popular list of important, critically admired and well known directors. A pantheon first, alphabetically from Bergman to Welles, the rest in changing order. And a few personal wild cards. 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
Cukor
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
Lumet
Lynch
Malick
Malle
Marker
Melville
Miyazaki
Mizoguchi
Monteiro
Murnau
Naruse
Nolan
Oliveira
Ophuls
Ozu
Pasolini
Pilger
Polanski
Powell
Ray (N)
Ray (S)
Renoir
Resnais
Rivette
Rohmer
Rossellini
Ruiz
Scorsese
Scott
Sembene
Spielberg
Sternberg
Tarantino
Tarkovsky
Tarr
Tourneur
Truffaut
Varda
Vertov
Visconti
Von Trier
Weerasethakul
Welles
Wenders
Wilder
Wiseman
Wong
Wyler
Yang
Zhang

Bubbling under: Argento, Borzage, Brakhage, Burns, Burton, Campion, Carné,, Cissé, Clair, Clouzot, Cocteau, Cronenberg, Cuaron, Curtiz, Dang, Dardenne bros, Demy, Denis, De Palma, Eastwood,, Erice, Farhadi, Feuillade, Fincher, Forman, Gerima, Ghatak, Greenaway, Guney, Hong, Ichikawa, Inarritu, Iosseliani, Ivens, Jackson, Jancso, Jarmusch, Jia, Chuck Jones, Jude, Kaul, Kaurismaki, Kawase, Kazan, Kitano, Robert Kramer, Leigh, Linklater, Martel, McQueen, Mekas, Mendes, Minnelli, Olmi, Marcel Ophuls, Oshima, Paradjanov, Peck, Peckinpah, Peries, Reed, Rocha, Sanjines, Sciamma, Mrinal .Sen, Shimizu, Sirk, Sjostrom, Sokurov, Stone, Preston Sturges, Tati, Tsai, Vidor, Vigo, Villeneuve, Vlacil, Von Stroheim, Wajda, Yoshida, Zanussi, Zinnemann, Zulawski….

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: A Canon,
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. Mario Gaborovic has done excellent lists on Balkans countries.

Some other lists I’ve done:

Essential Japanese Films ,
Kenji’s 1000 ,
The Labyrinth ,
The Mubi/Auteurs World Cup Films ,
The Welsh Connection ,
Let There be Light: The Birth of Films ,
Essayists, Diarists, Musers..Funambulists of Free Thought ,
A Rosefinch Sang: the Czechoslovakian New Wave ,
19th Century Britain ,
Essential French Films ,
Essential African Films ,
Portugal, Land of My Dreams ,
They Do Not Exist: Palestine ,
We Love Lesotho ,
India ,
Essential Iranian Films ,
Essential Documentaries ,
Essential Short Films & Featurettes ,
Essential Animation ,
Hidden Treasures ,
Leftist Films ,
Great Cinematographers ,
Favourite Films ,
Kenji’s Poetry Anthology 1 ,
Kenji’s Poetry Anthology 2