The 100 Greatest Directors of All-Time 3.0: The Complete List

Did you think this would let you know who the #1 director is? You fool! Read the list.

As I said on the 2.0 version, my lists are always organic; they continue to change and grow.  I’ve continued to watch films and new films have come out and I fiddled with the categories again as said in the introduction.  I’ve also already listed the directors who made my chart but didn’t make the Top 100.  It’s way overdue, but here is the final version of My Top 100 Directors of All-Time.

This list is in two parts.  The first just counts down the directors from #100 to #1 with their total score.  It includes a link to a piece on the director.  The number in that link is from the original list (or, in the case of directors who only made the 2.0 list, that list) and not from this list (unless they’re the same rank as before).  Those posts are now over a decade out of date and I haven’t bothered to write posts for the new directors to make the list (12 directors in all though three link to their Oscar Director post).

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The Top 100 Directors of All-Time 3.0: The Also-Rans

To create my 3.0 version of the Top 100 Directors of All-Time I didn’t just start with the previous versions of my list.  I created a chart that had several hundred names by including anyone who scored more than 10 points on the external Top 1000 list (see the Introduction for that point scale), anyone who had scored more than 10 points on the Consensus list (ditto) and anyone who had ever earned a Nighthawk point for directing.  From there, I narrowed it down to anyone who had at least 10 points on two of those three lists.  To be in the Top 1000 it wasn’t enough to just get points from one – you needed to have at least two groups agree you were deserving.

I did decide, for completeness sake, to add back in any director who had more than 40 on the external Top 1000 even if they had no points on the other two lists (8 directors, none of whom scored more than 340 points in total).  I also added in seven directors (misstated as six in the introduction) to provide context to the list.  I’ll explain more on that below.

Suffice to say, Godard, the director pictured above, is NOT ON THE LIST.  I considered titling this post “Sir Not Appearing on The Top 100 List” but thought people getting the joke might think that meant Gilliam didn’t make this version and he did so I didn’t.

 

The 100 Greatest Directors of All-Time 3.0: An Introduction

I have been promising this post for a long time.  The 2.0 version was posted in September of 2011, which really means it was my Century of Film post because I cut those posts off in 2011.  It got delayed for so long because I was so busy writing other posts and trying to come up with tweaks to my system.  The 1.0 and 2.0 versions had a couple of problems which I will describe below.

But a lot of films have been released since then as well.  Of those three brilliant directors pictured on the left, only one was on the first version and only two in the second.  What’s more, in September of 2011 those three men had never won an Oscar (out of one nomination for Director) while since then they have won a combined 5 Oscars just for Best Director (10 in total), almost as many as everyone else in the film industry combined in that time period.  This time, they’re all three in there and they have made some big leaps.

Now, down to business.

 

My Original Top 100 Movies

Lists are not a new thing for me.  Lists of the best films are not a new thing for me.  I have been doing this for so long that some of my old lists look like the work of a different person.

When cleaning up stuff at my mother’s house, I took her old Macintosh to be recycled.  But it wasn’t just her old computer.  It was the family computer that we bought in 1990.  It had old homework of mine from high school and among other things, what is possibly the first (certainly the oldest in existence) list of the Top 100 Movies of All-Time made by me.  As I prepare to dive into the Top 100 (through 2011), here’s a look back at a list I can’t really explain.  I’ll add a few notes at the bottom, but suffice to say, tastes change over time.

 

A Century of Film: The 100 Greatest Actors

A Century of Film

The 100 Greatest Actors

Introduction

Much as I did with Actress, this is the list that was obviously coming, the list of the 100 Greatest Film Actors of All-Time.

 

A Century of Film: My 100 Favorite Actors

So, this is a very different list than the one that will be appearing in the next post as you will already know from the Actress list.  In fact, rather than repeat the entire introduction from that post, I will just say that you should click on that link and read that intro first.  But the key to this list is that this is the favorites list, not the best, so remember that for all the bits about the actor.

 

A Century of Film: The 100 Greatest Actresses

It’s true this image isn’t in English but it saved me a lot of work and basically perfectly covers the Century of Film.  I found it here to give credit where credit is due.

A Century of Film

The 100 Greatest Actresses

Introduction

Two posts ago, I mentioned that I was not going to do any lists for my Absolute Points list and that it would be obvious why in two posts time.  In the previous post, my 100 Favorite Actresses, I mentioned that most of the actresses would not get a full description and that it would be obvious why in the next post.  This is that post (for both).

 

A Century of Film: My 100 Favorite Actresses

 

So, this is a very different list than the one that will be appearing in the next post.  This list is similar to my Top 100 Favorite Films.  This is purely a subjective list and does not rank actresses on how good I think they are but how much I enjoy watching them (which also means you can’t argue with my choices but you are free to comment on your own choices of favorites or least favorites – I didn’t include a list of least favorites but it would be topped by Whoopi Goldberg and Goldie Hawn).  Attractiveness has nothing to do with the ranking though there are some actresses that I enjoy partially because I find them highly attractive.  This is a list that basically says, do I want to watch a movie just because this actress is in the film?

 

My Top 100 Favorite Films

I have always been a proponent of the idea that I can separate what I think is brilliant from what I personally enjoy.  Let’s just look at 2015.  I think that Carol and The Revenant were the two best films of the year.  But if I’m going to sit and watch a movie from 2015, odds are it will be The Force Awakens (this is borne out by the fact that I’ve seen Carol twice, The Revenant all the way through once and The Force Awakens, at a modest count, 21 times complete plus the final 20 minutes about 15 more).

To that extent, I have finally culled together a list of my 100 Favorite Films, the ones I am most likely to sit still and watch, or at least not change the station if I come across them.  They’re not heavy Drama.  In fact, when I went through the genres, only one film on the entire list is one that I classify primarily as Drama (Casablanca).

It’s really hard to do this kind of list when you’ve seen as many films as I have (14,000+).  I put it together by going through year by year and adding films, and once I hit 100, knocking off the films at the bottom.  When I first read Veronica a list of 50 films, I then pointed out that those were the 50 I was about to delete because they didn’t make the list and she was stunned.  “But you love those films!” she pointed out.  “But I love the Top 100 even more,” I replied.  It was very, very tough.  Though they are easily two of the greatest directors of all-time if not the two greatest directors of all-time, not a single Kurosawa or Kubrick film ended up on the list.  There is no Bergman.  There is no David Lean.  The Ealing Comedies and the Hammer Horror, both of which I love so much I wrote about them only have one film each.  I did For Love of Film posts for James Bond (1 film) and Star Trek (2 films).  It’s really, really hard to narrow it all down.

 

My Top 100 U2 Songs (updated)

I have this poster. It’s not currently on any of our walls because it’s enormous.

Surely he’s insane, you think.  Top 100 Songs?  Do they even have 100 songs?

Well, to be precise, they have 223 235 songs that I considered for this list.  That includes the 131 142 different songs on the band’s 12 13 albums, 40 b-sides from the various singles over the year and 52 rare songs that have either been on soundtracks, tribute albums, compilations or were unreleased until the box set in 2006.

Note:  This update is coming in July of 2015, and all the updated bits are in red (except the links, which are in blue because of some formatting issues).  I could have done one much earlier – in October of 2014, say, when Songs of Innocence and Experience was released.  But, first, I wanted to give more time to listen to the album.  Second, I just saw U2 in Boston and have now had the chance to hear all the best songs off the album live.  So, I am reposting this with updates since the original post came out.  The list now covers 107 songs because I didn’t want to just lop the songs off the bottom of the list.  So, my Top 100 really begin with “Kite”.

So why would I waste my time with such a list, certainly some people are thinking.  And for those people who want to just trash on U2 or say how much they dislike them that’s fine, but I’m going to delete your comments.  Feel free to comment on something else.  Just skip the list.  If you disagree with my choice, if you say, like the band but don’t like my #1 song, well, feel free to comment.  I’m always up for the discussion.