Every year the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film selects a category and asks its membership to submit their favorite top films.  The group’s previous year-end topics have included Best Musicals, Best Sequels and Remakes, and Best Black and White Films.  This year, for 2022, the membership decided to pivot its focus: we present Chlotrudis’ take on the 100 Favorite  Film Directors.

Among the best directors selected by Chlotrudis members, almost half were from non-English speaking countries (45%).  20% of the selections on the list were directed by women, and 2 of them, Agnes Varda and Sarah Polley cracked the Top 20.   Among the 38 American directors selected, 3 were African-American: Spike Lee, Dee Rees and Jordan Peele.

To create this list, members were asked to come up with ranked lists of their favorite directors. After receiving all of the lists, numerical values were assigned to each of the rankings, and each movie was given a point total. Scores were weighted according to the number of viewers who had see the film, and ties were resolved by consideration of the number of lists a movie appeared on, followed by the highest ranking that movie reached.

This was an exciting, if at times maddening, list for members to compile.   There were many, many drafts, as different iterations jogged memories and forced people to re-arrange rankings.   We hope the following list provides as much lively conversation for your and your friends as it did the Chlotrudis members!

We hope you enjoy our list of our 100 Favorite Directors!

Robert Altman
Robert Altman

 

OUR FAVORITE DIRECTORS

1 Robert Altman USA
2 Mike Leigh UK
3 David Lynch USA
4 Todd Haynes USA
5 Akira Kurosawa Japan
6 Paul Thomas Anderson USA
7 Hirokazu Kore-eda Japan
8 Zhang Yimou China
9 Alfred Hitchcock UK/US
10 Billy Wilder US
11 Asghar Farhadi Iran
12 Stanley Kubrick UK
13 Werner Herzog Germany
14 Atom Egoyan Canada
15 Pedro Almodóvar Spain
16 Wes Anderson USA
17 Sarah Polley Canada
18 Martin Scorsese USA
19 François Truffaut France
20 Agnes Varda France
21 Ingmar Bergman Sweden
22 Spike Lee USA
23 Orson Welles USA
24 Wong Kar-Wai Hong Kong
25 Jane Campion Australia
26 Nicole Holofcener USA
27 Ethan & Joel Coen USA
28 Tsai Ming-liang Malaysia
29 Michelangelo Antonioni Italy
30 Jim Jarmusch USA
31 Jean-Luc Godard France
32 John Waters USA
33 Andrea Arnold UK
34 John Cassavetes USA
35 Woody Allen USA
36 Claire Denis France
37 Ang Lee Taiwan
38 Céline Sciamma France
39 Joanna Hogg UK
40 Francis Ford Coppola USA
41 Michael Haneke Austria
42 Bong Joon-ho South Korea
43 Andrei Tarkovsky Russia
44 Alfonso Cuarón Mexico
45 Derek Jarman UK
46 Kelly Reichardt USA
47 Mira Nair India
48 Hayao Miyazaki Japan
49 Roman Polanski France/Poland
50 Sofia Coppola USA
51 John Sayles USA
52 Federico Fellini Italy
53 Apichatpong Weerasethakul Thailand
54 Peter Weir Australia
55 Richard Linklater USA
56 James Ivory UK
57 Debra Granik USA
58 Xavier Dolan Canada
59 Buster Keaton USA
60 David Cronenberg Canada
61 Carl Theodor Dreyer Denmark
62 Howard Hawks USA
63 Olivier Assayas France
64 Rainer Warner Fassbinder Germany
65 Wiebke von Carolsfeld Canada
66 Maya Deren USA
67 Kogonada USA
68 Jean Renoir France
69 Kathryn Bigelow USA
70 David Fincher USA
71 Dee Rees USA
72 Patricia Rozema Canada
73 Nuri Bilge Ceylan Turkey
74 Bernardo Bertolucci Italy
75 Chris Marker France
76 Yorgos Lanthimos Greece
77 Lisa Cholodenko USA
78 Hou Hsiao-hsien Taiwan
79 Hal Hartley USA
80 Jordan Peele USA
81 Mike Nichols USA
82 Sergei Eisenstein Latvia
83 Quentin Tarantino USA
84 Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger UK
85 Steven Soderbergh USA
86 Sergio Leone Italy
87 Jacques Demy France
88 Fritz Lang Germany/US
89 Gillian Armstrong Australia
90 William Friedkin USA
91 Robert Eggers USA
92 Christian Petzold Germany
93 F.W. Murnau Germany/US
94 Albert Maysles USA
95 Todd Field USA
96 Jafar Panahi Iran
97 Park Chan-wook South Korea
98 Lynne Ramsay UK
99 Edward Yang Taiwan
100 Terence Malick USA