20 underrated movies from great directors

Most of you know the movie Weapons. That crazy, gonzo delight about missing children in a seemingly quaint town wasn't the first entry into bonkers horror from Cregger, who burst onto the scene with a tale of a haunted house through the generations. Taking up real estate in your mind, "Barbarian" is a classic slasher with a hilariously bonkers twist.

The director of Fight Club and Seven, Fincher, is about as widely beloved as modern directors get. Known for his inky, dark thrillers about morality and perception, one of the director's best films is about a game gifted to a wound-up stockbroker who loses sight of reality in a labyrinthine maze of realistic puzzle pieces.

Arguably the most renowned director in Cinema history, Scorsese is to gangster flicks what Matisse is to abstract modernism. You can't bring up action movies without bringing up Scorsese, who revitalized the genre with gritty, propulsively energetic thrillers at the intersection of neo-realism and French New Wave aesthetics. His update of Paul Newman's The Hustler sees Tom Cruise with Oprah-couch energy hustling people for money.

Most guys would perk up at the sight of beautiful twin sisters, but not these two. In Brian De Palma's seedy thriller, the twins are attached at birth and detached from reality, lost in a state of diagnosed confusion matched by the director's disorienting use of suspense.

The director of Point Break and Zero Dark Thirty was once a scrappy indie director sinking her teeth into small-budget, unsettling thrillers. Her vampire drama, Near Dark, has the sweltering heat of an Australian New Wave classic with the seedy underbelly of a Sundance horror flick.

My desert island film! Amacord is a dazzling childhood reminiscence about Fellini growing up in Italy, screwing off with his Vitiloni's and meeting the fantastical characters of his Italian seaside town. Filmed with almost impossible poetry, the film is gorgeous to look at and hilarious to experience--a whistling seaside breeze that wafts in colors of yellow puffballs and colorful characters.

What if the shark in Jaws was a sentient truck that stalked people in the desert? It might sound silly, but Spielberg's original film laid the blueprint (or roadmap) for his tactical use of suspense and his fascination with the fantastical.

Everyone knows The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and while most movie fans are familiar with much of Kubrick's catalog, the anti-war film Paths of Glory has gone unnoticed, as it follows nameless men sent to fight an unjust war in this infuriating, impressive thriller. Paths of Glory is one of the ultimate films about war's perilous unfairness.

What's for dinner, you ask--a whole lot more than what's on the dining room table in Hitchcock's Rope. In essentially a one-room thriller, a corpse is stashed under the wooden table, and shocking twists are served for dessert.

Speaking of bodies in the basement, Frank Capra's shockingly dark satire about newlyweds who find a body in their new home is deadly funny. Capra hails from an era when directors could do it all--all genres, styles, whatever the studio asked of them--and this inky black farce is proof of the director's immense range.

A detective with insomnia tracks down a serial killer through the hazy mists of his troubled mind in Christopher Nolan's massively underappreciated gem. Of course, this movie isn't on the level of Memento or Inception, but it remains a fascinating exercise in Nolan's playful use of cinematic techniques.

There might not be a more quoted movie amongst my friends than Step Brothers, which masters the oh-so difficult ability to exercise childish humor with the utmost intelligence. When two grown men become stepbrothers, acting like children in a house of learned doctors, the laughs from McKay's script hit you in the funny bone with the force of a pillow stuffed with bars of soap. 

There may be no director more underrated than Robert Altman, though movie fans regard him in the same tier as Scorsese and Kubrick. His most underrated film matches his realistic use of overlapping sound and dialogue with a frantic tale of degenerate gamblers that must have certainly inspired Uncut Gems.

It's impossible to explain the impact Bergman's films had on cinema to the uninitiated, just as it's impossible to describe their mood to someone who hasn't seen them. Perverse, philosophical, unsettling, and altogether astounding, Cries and Whispers sees a woman slowly die from cancer in a slow-burn chamber piece of dread.

A man is charged with the death penalty but doesn't know what he's accused of in this taut, confined thriller from the great Orson Welles. It's not Citizen Kane, but what is--this Kafka adaptation is further proof that when Welles can actually complete a movie, it's completely enthralling from start to finish.

The funniest movie ever made. The Naked Gun fires off quotable one-liners at a rate I've never seen, as an aloof detective must solve the Queen's attempted murder.

Speaking of police spoofs, the consistently hilarious Hot Fuzz proves Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead wasn't a one-off. Unfortunately, more people haven't seen the movie. Set in a tiny village where nothing ever goes wrong, except the bodies piling up like the cobblestone walls along the highway, Hot Fuzz is one of the funniest movies this century.

More underrated comedy movies! The Nazi satire might have been a little dark for its era, even though Chaplin spoofed Hitler years earlier. To Be or Not to Be has grown into one of the wittiest, smartest comedies ever made, with lines like "we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping" hailing from all corners of the frame. 

He inspired the West; he inspired Star Wars, and he partially inspired me to write this list, as Akira Kurosawa has more underrated mysteries than most directors have cemented classics. Ran is a mix of Shakespeare and samurai action, with some of the most impressive color, cinematography, and storytelling ever put on film.

The greatest animated director ever, Hayao Miyazaki, has built a following in the Western hemisphere with Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, but many classics still remain for audiences to see. Ponyo is his cutest film, featuring his poetic hand-drawn animation, wonderful storytelling, and the fantastical premise of a fish turning into a human.