40. Paul Verhoeven
It’s a compromise no. 40, but no one had Verhoeven on their lists initially, except for the one person who has seen “Elle” and put him in the top 10. The former is a mark of how long he’s been away — aside from the multi-platform TV project “Tricked,” he hasn’t directed since his excellent 2006 WWII movie “Black Book.” And it’s also a mark of just how good “Elle” is — recently named France’s Foreign Language Oscar pick (a ballsy choice), it stars a career-best Isabelle Huppert and tackles its highly problematic rape storyline with something like glee. But then, subverting even the most sacred of cows has always been Verhoeven’s superpower, and if it’s made him largely unbackable in timid Hollywood of late, which prefers to remake his genre classics like “RoboCop” and “Total Recall” into much blander packages, here’s hoping “Elle” signals the beginning of a new phase of productivity for this most mischievously smart of filmmakers.
39. David Lynch
No other director on this list has been as inactive recently as David Lynch. Well, inactive is the wrong word: He’s been doing art shows and pop albums and probably released a fragrance or something, but the maestro of the unsettlingly strange hasn’t actually shot a properly released film since “Inland Empire” nearly a decade ago. But that changes next year with the return of “Twin Peaks” to TV, with Lynch helming every episode, and a year that brings a dozen or so hours of new Lynch filmmaking brings reason to celebrate. The word Lynchian gets thrown about a lot, but the pale imitations so often miss the point so much that it just makes you appreciate the original more: the terrifyingly beautiful nature of his images, the ominous rhythms, the way that the strangeness is always built on a bed of humanity. “Inland Empire” tested some viewers’ patience, but after 10 years away, we couldn’t be happier to have Lynch back.
38. Sofia Coppola
Nepotism is a real thing, which is why (currently) five members of the immediate Coppola family have got to direct feature films. But without talent, you’re not going to direct more than one, and good lord did Sofia Coppola prove she was talented long ago. Beginning with dreamy coming-of-age tale “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola’s films have always carved out a very distinct groove, a million miles away from that of her “Godfather”-directing pops: insular, intimate films telling (predominately) the stories of women, their pulsing beauty and swoony soundtracks masking a filmmaker who’s deceptively incisive about getting inside the head of her characters. By the end of the trilogy she’s been telling over the last decade about lives of privilege, it started to feel like she needed a change of subject, but that’s exactly what she’s got coming up: Next year, her remake of Don Siegel’s Western “The Beguiled,” with Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning, will arrive, and that should be a welcome change of pace.
37. Edgar Wright
Film comedies rarely get the kind of respect that dramas do. In part that’s because what a person finds funny varies so wildly, but in part it’s because even some of the best mainstream comedies look flat and uninteresting on screen. Thank God, then, for Edgar Wright, a man who understands more than anyone working right now that comedy shouldn’t just be funny people saying funny things, but that you can make the camera and the editing and the sound design work to maximize the satisfaction for everyone involved. Whether with his impeccable Cornetto trilogy (which got stranger and richer as they went along) or the giddy pop-art of “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World,” Wright pens intricate, gag-packed scripts, and then brings them to bursting cinematic life. And if next year’s “Baby Driver” lives up to even a fraction of our Busby Berkeley/Buster Keaton/Walter Hill/Mad Max hopes for it, it’ll be one of the films of the year.
36. Wes Anderson
There are few directors who create such immediately recognizable worlds and distinctive characters as Wes Anderson. Sometimes, that can be a drawback: Around the time of “The Darjeeling Limited,” he threatened to ossify, and he’s been the subject of hundreds of lazy, symmetrical, Kinks-scored parodies. But his last three films have all tweaked the formula to hugely satisfying effect: “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was an autumnal visual joy that both paid tribute to Roald Dahl’s original book while remaining utterly Wes-esque; “Moonrise Kingdom” had a pleasing Truffaut-esque looseness and liveliness that was new to his work without abandoning the storybook qualities; and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” double-downed on the more precious chocolate-box elements of his work, and yet still packed an emotional punch (and went on to be his biggest hit to date). As easy as he can be to mock, his work still remains utterly rewarding, and more so with each viewing, and we can’t wait for his next, a Japan-set stop-motion animation about dogs.
35. Park Chan-wook
One of two Korean filmmakers (Kim Jee-woon being the other, see above) to come roaring back to form in 2016 after a disappointing English-language debut, Park Chan-wook is probably one of the better known of his country’s current crop of peerless genre filmmakers, based on the popularity of his sick, slick, violent “Vengeance Trilogy.” But those films — “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance” — are only half the story, and his filmography also boasts hugely popular Korean history epic “JSA” and the ornately perverse vampire movie “Thirst” among other striking, hyperstylish titles. But after the good-looking but oddly hollow “Stoker” saw him stumble in English, Park is back with a bang (actually several literal bangs) with “The Handmaiden,” a cross-cultural and cross-historical adaptation of Sarah Waters‘ bestseller “Fingersmith.” He is a visual stylist without compare, and “The Handmaiden” gives him exactly the kind of heavily erotic, fetishizably twisty storyline to justify such sinfully delicious craft.
34. Jacques Audiard
It’s strange to make a film that wins the Palme d’Or and yet still feels undervalued. Jacques Audiard’s “Dheepan” won the top Cannes prize from the Coen Brothers’ jury in 2015 and yet remains rather underseen, but in our opinion it fits beautifully into one of the most impressive bodies of work in world cinema right now. He’s been acclaimed in France since the early 1990s, but it was his 2005 crime film “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” a remake of James Toback’s “Fingers,” that brought him to a new level of awareness, swiftly followed by prison-set gangster classic “A Prophet” and bruising melodrama “Rust & Bone.” His work is muscular, tender, gripping and visually striking, and he’s brought new energy to the crime film in particular which will likely continue to influence filmmakers for years. For his next trick, he’s coming to America for his first English-language film “The Sisters Brothers,” a Western starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix.
33. Jill Soloway
The TV refuseniks may be horrified to see someone who has only a sole feature, and one that divided critics at that, so high on this list. But what is “Transparent,” which Jill Soloway created and has directed more than half of at this point, if not one of the most consistently gorgeous, finely honed and moving independent films of recent years (while still, crucially, functioning as a TV series, unlike some of its one-long-movie rivals). Soloway’s roots are in TV, with credits including “Six Feet Under” and “United States of Tara,” but she stood out with Sundance pic “Afternoon Delight.” But it was “Transparent” that took the virtues of that film — a scabrous wit; a willingness to tackle selfish, sometimes unlikable people with compassion; a singular voice; Kathryn Hahn being awesome — and perfected the formula. No wonder that Amazon have made her their figurehead — aside from a second upcoming show, “I Love Dick,” she’s also got a couple of movies in development with the streaming giant.
32. Leos Carax
After an eyecatching debut feature in “Boy Meets Girl” in 1983, Leos Carax‘s two subsequent, Denis Lavant-starring features were the ones that cemented his contradictory persona: Early masterpiece “Mauvais Sang” made him the voice of a French arthouse generation; and then the troubled, overbudget production of “The Lovers On The Bridge” made him almost the caricature of the temperamental, self-aggrandizing, perfectionist auteur. “Pola X” followed, to muted reception, and after it came 13 years without a feature film at all until 2012’s “Holy Motors.” Even then, we’d have felt justified in excluding him from this list on the grounds of lack of recent titles alone, except “Holy Motors,” which also stars Lavant in an astonishingly chimeric performance, is just so much film — such a blazingly brilliant and weird assortment of grotesque, surreal and inexpressibly moving moments that it will probably take us at least another decade to fully recover from.
31. Cary Fukunaga
Another filmmaker who began in features but has truly excited people thanks to his TV work, Cary Fukunaga was already a fast-rising star before then. His debut “Sin Nombre,” about the hard journey of a young Honduran girl attempting to make it to the U.S. border, was a grippy, heady thriller with a level of execution and ambition that totally belied its status as a first feature. Follow-up “Jane Eyre” took a left turn, but was equally good, bringing the sexuality and spookiness back to the classic Gothic romance. “True Detective” came next, and if the misfire of a Fukunaga-free second season proved anything, it’s that the director was the glue that held the show together, the almost mystical feel he brought to proceedings, and his facility with actors, elevating it above simple genre fare. His tremendous last feature “Beasts Of No Nation” didn’t get the audience it deserved despite, or perhaps because of, its much-vaunted Netflix bow, but it only cemented Fukunaga as one of the most exciting talents of his generation.