Finding the Greatest Directors of All Time

Encompassing the entire range of human emotion and expression, with varying political and social purposes, and influenced by centuries of evolving artistic styles, it is impossible to summarize an entire film in a single number. I will do this anyway.

First, since I do not have the time nor energy to watch 2,200 movies, I had to get some help from review aggregation sites. I used:

Letterboxd

- highly rates recent movies, women in leading roles

- underrates difficult-to-understand movies

RateYourMusic

- highly rates indie/underground movies

- underrates childrens' and popular movies

iMDb

- highly rates superhero movies

- underrates non-English and difficult movies

I normalized the three scales and weighted Letterboxd, RateYourMusic, and iDMb 40%/40%/10% respectively. This gives a ranking of the greatest movies of all time:

1. 切腹 [Harakiri] (1962, dir. Kobayashi) - 4.39 + 4.67 + 8.6 -> 4.370

2. Иди и смотри [Come and See] (1985, dir. Klimov) - 4.37 + 4.65 + 8.4 -> 4.349

3. The Godfather (1972, dir. Coppola) - 4.35 + 4.56 + 9.2 -> 4.348

4. 12 Angry Men (1957, dir. Lumet) - 4.33 + 4.61 + 9.0 -> 4.345

5. The Godfather: Part II (1974, dir. Coppola) - 4.29 + 4.59 + 9.0 -> 4.320

6. 七人の侍 [Seven Samurai] (1954, dir. Kurosawa) - 4.31 + 4.60 + 8.6 -> 4.319

7. Twin Peaks: Northwest Passage (1989, dir. Lynch) - 4.26 + 4.58 + 8.9 -> 4.304

8. Dekalog (1989, dir. Kieślowski) - 4.28 + 4.53 + 9.0 -> 4.297

9. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966, dir. Leone) - 4.34 + 4.49 + 8.8 -> 4.286

10. 人間の條件 完結篇 第五部死の脱出/第六部曠野の彷徨 [The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer] (1961, dir. Kobayashi) - 4.25 + 4.52 + 8.8 -> 4.263

11-50: Parasite, High and Low, Apocalypse Now, The End of Evangelion, Spirited Away, Stalker, GoodFellas, A Brighter Summer Day, Yi Yi, Ran, Woman in the Dunes, Ikiru, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Human Condition I: No Greater Love, There Will Be Blood, Andrei Rublev, City of God, Persona, Sunset Blvd., The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Paths of Glory, The Hole, Satantango, Tokyo Story, Once Upon a Time in the West, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Fanny and Alexander, It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012), Princess Mononoke, Schindler's List, Rear Window, Grave of the Fireflies, The Apartment, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, The Thing, Paris, Texas, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks

I like this list. There is a lot of diversity in genre and language that none of the individual sites had. Though I would like to see more recent movies near the top, I understand that it can take a decade or two to build a reputation.

Note: these ratings and constantly changing, I just pulled current numbers from July of 2023. By "pulled," I mean I manually entered all of these.

Getting the list of these movies to track was kind of abstract. I looked at directors from several greatest-of-all-time lists, as well as going pages and pages deep into individual movie rankings. I only took movies above a certain number of ratings, so some directors have many fewer movies tracked than they actually made. Personally, I think this is fair, and also saves me a lot of work.

Now that we have movie rankings, how do we turn that into director rankings? You can't simply average them, as making one good movie and one great movie would then be worse then just making the great movie. You can't sum all the scores, since then mediocre but prolific directors would top the list.

I decided on a system as follows:

(aggregate rating - 3)^2*100, if aggregate rating < 3 then multiply by -0.5

This gives positive score for movies at or above 3.00/5 aggregate rating, and a smaller amount of negative score for lower ratings. For each director, the sum of the scores for all their movies were taken. This gives the following ranking (with most notable movie in parentheses):

1. Akira Kurosawa - 1,486 from 16 movies (m.n. Seven Samurai)

2. Ingmar Bergman - 1,426 from 20 movies (m.n. Persona)

3. Martin Scorsese - 1,233 from 29 movies (m.n. GoodFellas)

4. Alfred Hitchcock - 1,125 from 30 movies (m.n. Rear Window)

5. Yasujiro Ozu - 1,089 from 16 movies (m.n. Tokyo Story)

6. Stanley Kubrick - 931 from 13 movies (m.n. 2001: A Space Odyssey)

7. Hayao Miyazaki - 828 from 11 movies (m.n. Spirited Away)

8. Billy Wilder - 811 from 12 movies (m.n. Sunset Blvd.)

9. Werner Herzog - 794 from 22 movies (m.n. Aguirre, the Wrath of God)

10. David Lynch - 786 from 18 movies (m.n. Twin Peaks: Northwest Passage)

11-50: Masaki Kobayashi, Luis Buñuel, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, Joel Coen, Sidney Lumet, Don Hertzfeldt, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Fold Coppola, Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Frederick Wiseman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kenji Mizoguchi, Abbas Kiarostami, Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray, Christopher Nolan, Éric Rohmer, Roman Polański, Paul Thomas Anderson, Howard Hanks, Robert Bresson, Buster Keaton, Wim Wenders, Hirozaku Kore-eda, John Ford, Edward Yang, Theo Angelopoulos, Jacques Rivette, John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Goddard, Peter Jackson, Wong Kar-wai, Robert Altman, Wes Anderson

And there you have it, Kurosawa is the greatest. I think this fairly rewards great movies over good ones, and does not allow mediocre but prolific directors near the top.

Compiling this list took around two dozen hours of manual data entry, but I truly thought it was valuable for exposing me to so many bits of culture I had no idea about, and I hope you now want to explore many of these titles like I do.

Additional fun facts:

Movies tracked: 2,383

Directors tracked: 372

Year range: 1915-2023

Top countries: United States, United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany

When a movie had multiple directors, I made multiple entries, one per director. The only movies in the top 200 with multiple directors were The Red Shoes and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Worst movies:

Disaster Movie (rating: 0.734), Epic Movie, The Last Airbender, Meet the Spartans, Cats, Movie 43, Fifty Shades of Grey, Batman & Robin, Transformers: The Last Knight, After Earth, Transformers: Age of Extinction, 10,000 BC, Suicide Squad (2016), Pixels, Year One, Wild Wild Best, Zoolander 2, Scary Movie 4, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D

Worst directors:

Jason Friedberg (score: -652), Michael Bay, M. Night Shyamalan, Roland Emmerich, Peter Farrelly, Robert Rodríguez, Zack Snyder, Joel Schumacher, Barry Sonnenfeld, Tom Hooper

Best movies, places 51-100:

The Shining, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Paris Is Burning, Sansho the Bailiff, City Lights, Alien, Scenes From a Marriage, Night and Fog, It's a Wonderful Life, The Seventh Seal, Hate, Perfect Blue, Love Exposure, Mulholland Dr. Taxi Driver, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, M, Close-Up, Mirror, Sherlock, Jr., Memories of Murder, Do the Right Thing, Oldboy, No Country For Old Men, Modern Times, The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, In the Mood for Love, Hoop Dreams, The Word, The Ascent, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Late Spring, A Separation, The Battle of Algiers, Wild Strawberries, Vertigo, The Dark Knight, Whiplash, The World of Apu, Autumn Sonata, Bicycle Thieves, Nights of Cabiria, Citizen Kane, Metropolis, The Cranes Are Flying, Lawrence of Arabia

Places 101-200:

Werckminster Harmonies, The Red Shoes, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 8½, A Clockwork Orange, Man With a Movie Camera, A Man Escaped, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Silence of the Lambs, I Am Cuba, Das Boot, Three Colours: Red, Edvard Munch, Chinatown, The Wages of Fear, Casablanca, The 400 Blows, Before Sunrise, Solaris, Double Indemnity, Children of Paradise,m Pather Panchali, Before Sunset, The Sweet Life, Red Beard, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Pier, An Elephant Sitting Still, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Yojimbo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, All About Eve, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Fargo, Dog Day Afternoon, Chungking Express, Once Upon a Time in America, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Singin' in the Rain, The Great Dictator, To Be or Not to Be, Witness for the Prosecution, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Ugetsu, Welfare, The Handmaiden. The Third Man, Rashomon, Koyaanisqatsi, It's Such a Beautiful Day (2011), Rocco and His Brothers, Fight Club, Se7en, Raging Bull, Paper Moon, Raise the Red Lantern, Army of Shadows, Throne of Blood, Where Is the Friend's House?, The Celebration, The Elephant Man, Blade Runner, The New Land, Rosemary's Baby, The Wrong Trousers, North by Northwest, Samurai Rebellion, Oppenheimer, Umberto D., Amadeus, The Sacrifice, Funeral Parade of Roses, Ace in the Hole, Inglourious Basterds, The Easy Life, The Night, The Big Lebowski, Tokyo Twilight, Network, For a Few Dollars More, Dersu Uzala, Rififi, The Pianist, Baraka, The Samurai, Winter Light, The Hunt, Opening Night, [Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels], Cinema Paradiso, Underground, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, All That Jazz, Nostalgia, Wings of Desire, Playtime, The Life of Oharu