The best filmmakers of the 21st century

Johnson’s high-school neo-noir “Brick” heralded the arrival of a distinctive and brainy new talent. His sophomore effort, “The Brothers Bloom” was a delightfully ornate conman yarn, at which point we seemed to have a Peter Bogdanovich/Coen Brothers hybrid on our hands. Then came the sci-fi bouillabaisse of “Looper”, at which point Johnson defied classification. There’s an alternate reality where Johnson closed out the third trilogy of “Star Wars”, but we’ll take the timeline where he follows up “The Last Jedi” with the ripping, thematically thorny whodunnit “Knives Out”. Johnson owes two more Benoit Blanc mysteries to Netflix, but he’s been too much of a genre shapeshifter up to this point to get pigeonholed. His best, most ambitious work is almost certainly yet to come.

One of the most valuable experiences a filmmaker can provide is to draw the viewer deep into a time and place that would otherwise go ignored because the outside world has never taken an interest. With her superb Salta trilogy, Martel spoke for the girls and women of the Argentine province where she grew up. There’s no nostalgia here. In the framework of a family drama “La Ciénega”), a coming-of-age film (“The Holy Girl”) and a psychological thriller “The Headless Woman”, Martel delivered three patient, prickly accounts of three very different females resisting in their way the constraints of a patriarchal society. It took her almost ten years to get her fourth film, “Zama”, before cameras, but the wait was well worth it. What starts out as a richly composed (visually and aurally) period drama about the folly of colonialism gradually morphs into a broader meditation on the purpose of life.

There’s not a trickier genre to get right than melodrama, which is probably why very few directors even attempt it anymore (and those that do hedge their bets by going camp). As evidenced by the exquisite, tear-jerking duo of “Love & Basketball” and “Beyond the Lights”, Prince-Bythewood can manage huge emotional swings without a whiff of affectation. Whether it’s a romance set within the pressure cooker of prep/college basketball or a love affair between a global pop star and the cop who saves her life, Prince-Bythewood invests her films with a cathartic depth of feeling that stays with you long after the credits roll. Her 2020 Netflix hit “The Old Guard” was an exhilarating romp in the superhero sandbox, while her next, “The Woman King”, is a historical epic starring Viola Davis as a fierce West African military general. Yes, please.

The divide between hardcore cinephiles and, well, everyone else who watches movies couldn’t be starker when it comes to the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Most people do not possess the attention span nor the capacity for deconstruction to seriously engage with “Tropical Malady”, “Syndromes and a Century”, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” and “Memoria” - which is heartbreaking because, while most of these movies are distinctly of their culture, they are also wide open for interpretation regardless of one’s nationality. They’re about romance, families, and things that literally go bump in the night, but they progress at a “meditative” pace. They are, as we say of anything that does not move at the breakneck pace of a Marvel movie, “immersive”. Weerasethakul is attuned to the hidden rhythms of the natural world; via astute framing and meticulous sound design, he imbues his films with an ineffable spirituality. Through the lens of Weerasethakul’s camera, we’ve discovered this entire planet is haunted in ways we could’ve never imagined.

Wrongly reviled by critics throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s as a peddler of empty, excessively violent action screenplays (which routinely fetched north of $1 million on the exploding spec market), Black resurfaced in 2005 as a neo-noir auteur with his directorial debut, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”. Though “Lethal Weapon”, “The Last Boy Scout” and “The Long Kiss Goodnight” are all spectacularly entertaining films, Black being in complete control of his material for the first time in his career made a huge difference; it’s got more in common with a shaggy ‘70s detective yarn than a maximalist, mega-budget studio tentpole. After making the most thematically complex Marvel movie with “Iron Man 3”, Black served up the sublime “The Nice Guys”. Black’s hapless-underdogs-coming-through-in-the-clutch formula has gained gravitas as he’s gotten older. He’s a little wiser and a tad more sentimental. Only Black could coax a tear or two out of the “You will be happy” moment in “The Nice Guys”.

There have been few first-to-second-film leaps as staggering as Jenkins going from the modest “Medicine for Melancholy” to the miraculous “Moonlight”. He nearly topped that achievement with the searing tragedy of “If Beale Street Could Talk”. You walk into his films with an assumed despair; we know how it goes for his characters in the worlds and eras he’s depicting, so we’re determined not to get our hearts broken more than necessary. In “Beale Street”, his lusciously composed images of Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) falling in love are freighted with a sense of doom, and yet we can’t possibly imagine the extent to which they’re going to suffer. But there’s real, reasonable hope expressed in the denouements of “Moonlight” and “Beale Street”. Jenkins may not be an optimist, but he is a fighter. His films sting and sing with struggle. We’ll need his voice for the trouble ahead.

How do you follow up one of the most indelible debut films of all time, one that the director of “The Exorcist” called the most “terrifying” movie he’s ever seen? How about spinning a brutal tale about the abject cruelty of men in 1920s Tanzania. Whereas “The Babadook” masterfully explored single-mother anxieties within the framework of a supernatural horror film, “The Nightingale” subverted the typically regressive rapė-revenge subgenre by adding a rough layer of racial resentment. Kent is a natural visual storyteller, and utterly fearless when it comes to challenging her audience. This might get her into trouble (e.g. her stern refusal to franchise “The Babadook” probably frustrates those who stand to profit from it), but she’s got that vision thing something fierce. In terms of untapped potential, there’s not a more exciting filmmaker working today.

When your second film is frequently compared favorably to David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (while predating it by four years), you’re probably not a flash-in-the-pan talent. Indeed, you might just be one of the best directors on the planet. Throughout his seven features, Bong Joon-ho has dazzled audiences with his effortless command of widely disparate tones. There aren’t many filmmakers who can have you bawling one minute and laughing hysterically the next, which makes Bong one of our most precious cinematic resources. He’s comfortable working on any scale and has yet to strike a seriously false note. He’s a humanist, a satirist and a pessimist all rolled into one. He is the perfect artist for our perilous moment. May he never let us down.

There’s no shortage of filmmakers adept at making viewers squirm, but very few have an interest in cutting their cruelty with a genuine affection for their characters. Not so with Maren Ade. In her three excellent features (“Forest for the Trees”, “Everyone Else” and “Tori Erdmann”), the German director has proven to be our leading explorer of Fremdschämen. Her movies make you laugh out of knowing embarrassment even as you crumple into a ball in your seat. You may want to flee the theater at times, but you trust Ade to find a graceful landing place for her frazzled dramatis personae (particularly if you’ve seen her first film, which boasts one of the most breathtakingly perfect endings in film history). She pushed the outside of the embarrassment envelope with the 160-minute “Toni Erdmann”, and wound up with a profoundly moving masterpiece. We’ll take that fourth movie whenever you’re ready, Ms. Ade.

It’s strange to call a two-time winner of the Best Director Oscar “divisive”, but Iñárritu is a big, brash talent with a penchant for rubbing viewers’ noses in the muck and misery of life. He jarred us with the undeniably great “Amores Perros” before spinning out with the mind-numbingly metaphorical “21 Grams”. He has a great deal in common with Oliver Stone, a brilliant filmmaker who’s undercut more than a few potential masterpieces with his heavy-handed approach. Iñárritu’s technique is stunning, but his movies are a pre-chewed meal. If that sounds incredibly unappealing, well, that’s why some of us dread sitting through his films. “The Revenant” is by far his most satisfying work, a wilderness adventure on par with “Jeremiah Johnson”. The more focused he is on story, the less likely he’ll beat us over the head with theme.

With the one-two punch-kick-punch-etcetera of “The Raid” and “The Raid 2”, Evans established himself as a first-rate director of action. There’s a whole, 21st-century cottage industry of punch-up cinema catering to the combat-flick faithful, but Evans’s movies boast the kind of superior fight choreography, superlative shot composition, and dynamic editing that set greats like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li apart from their competition. It certainly helps to have stars Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian at your limb-snapping disposal, but anyone who doubted Evans’s visual proficiency outside of this genre ate a heaping helping of crow with the psyche-scarring folk horror of “Apostle”. Regardless of the genre, Evans’s movies leave you feeling pummeled. And while they have a firm moral center, the violence their heroes must inflict on others to do what’s right reminds us that there may be no tangible reward for running the gauntlet. These people fight because they couldn’t live with themselves otherwise.

Asghar Farhadi is the most consistently provocative dramatist world cinema has seen since Ingmar Bergman or Krzysztof Kieślowski. That he’s pulled this off under the censorious purview of Iranian censors may seem miraculous, but he’s really just employed the kind of good, old-fashioned thematic smuggling Hollywood filmmakers have been getting away with since the days of the Hays Code. In doing so, with acutely perceptive masterpieces like “A Separation” and “The Past”, he’s crafted a body of work that has un-othered Iranian society, and, in disquieting ways, drawn distinct parallels with an increasingly restrictive American society.

Seemingly out of the blue, Jordan Peele went from sketch comedy superstar to world-class filmmaker. It’s difficult to think of a more startling transition, but Mr. Peele has arrived, and, with his first two movies (“Get Out” and “Us”), brought uncommon smarts to the horror genre. He’s both playful and playing for keeps, mining his bizarre situations for laughs while placing his characters in mortal, moral danger. “Get Out” is a dıck-kick “Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner” that anticipated the wealthy Democrat swing to Trump, while “Us” deals with the terror of assimilation in a manner that speaks directly to its African-American audience. The latter prompted mixed reviews, but it’s a much richer work than its detractors realized. It’s a genre flick about something that’s totally alien to the vast majority of white viewers, and, well, it’s about f*****g time.

Curiosity is key to being a worthwhile artist, and Baker has it in spades. Since his 2000 debut with “Four Letter Words”, he’s made films about white bros, a Chinese immigrant, a Ghanaian immigrant, transgender sex workers, poor white folks living on the fringe of Disneyworld, and a gay pōrn star who returns to his Texas hometown. “Tangerine” emitted a raw intimacy with its shot-on-iPhone aesthetic, while “The Florida Project” achieved a more tactile raggedness by being shot largely on 35mm film. Baker is a burrower in the best sense. He delves deep inside the worlds of his characters and makes no judgments. It’s a rare talent that many of our best documentarians don’t possess. It’s also harder and harder to keep one’s biases to themself nowadays, so Baker’s objectivity is all the more vital.

Just what in the hell is David Robert Mitchell up to? His first film, “The Myth of the American Sleepover”, is a gently nostalgic snapshot of wistful near-misses as desperate do-overs at the outset of a new school year. “It Follows” is a horror classic about young people contending with a fatal sexual awakening. “Under the Silver Lake” both lampoons and sympathizes with the idle paranoia of Los Angeles layabouts. Mitchell’s influences are clear (Linklater, Carpenter, Demy), but he twists his genre exercises into strange, out-of-time experiences. You never know when you are. This temporal displacement is the stuff of dreams and nightmares; it’s like watching a direct download from Mitchell’s subconscious. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent. It’s not surprising that Tarantino is apparently obsessed with and jealous of his output.

Arnold entered the filmmaking fray as a Dogme 95-inspired genre noodler with “Red Road”, but she quickly set herself apart with the hard-nosed character study “Fish Tank”. She coaxed a blazingly brilliant performance out of newcomer Katie Jarvis, which flowed naturally into her naturalistic adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” (a rain-soaked film that could leave you curled up in a quilt on a ninety-five-degree afternoon). Arnold seemed dialed into the ungovernable, self-destructive passions of young people, hence “American Honey”, a raucous road trip of a movie that’s ultimately more exhausting than exhilarating. After a rough go on the HBO series “Big Little Lies”, Arnold turned in her long-in-gestation documentary “Cow”. A reset may be in order, but Arnold’s abilities cannot be doubted.

The mad Greek of modern cinema started out as an acquired taste with the brain-scrambling “Dogtooth” before going quasi-mainstream with “The Lobster”. He’s an actor’s director in that he imagines outrageously broad situations that allow performers to weaponize every single one of their senses, but his movies are strangely ephemeral. “Dogtooth” and “The Favourite” are the exceptions: one is fully committed to its insanity, while the other gives us three spectacularly talented actors going full-tilt crazy. Lanthimos is never out of control, but he does seem more determined to rattle his audience rather than connecting with them.

Blessed with a Rohmer-ian gift for locating the small gestures that alter the course of a relationship or a character’s very existence, Hansen-Løve gives us hope that the next generation of filmmakers (and film watchers) possess the attentiveness and patience for discovering life’s little epiphanies. All six of her theatrical features are lovely and deeply personal, but the last three - “Eden”, “Things to Come” and “Bergman Island” - are major, full-stride triumphs. “Bergman Island” is her finest film to date, a preposterously meta premise that evades preciousness with every airy step. At the mere age of forty, the prime years of Hansen-Løve’s career surely lie ahead.

McQueen was an acclaimed visual artist before he took the leap into features with the unremittingly bleak “Hunger”. McQueen effortlessly segued from the misery of hunger strikes to the degradation of sexual addiction, establishing himself as one of cinema’s foremost crafter of great films you never want to watch more than once. Amazingly, McQueen’s adaptation of “12 Years a Slave” was, while plenty brutal, open to notions of hope and reconciliation; the movie deservedly won Oscars for Best Picture and Director, launching the filmmaker to the upper echelon of Hollywood’s A-list. His follow-up was the immensely entertaining crime flick, “Widows”. McQueen then zagged to the anthology series “Small Axe”, which immersed viewers in the experiences - awful and joyous - of West Indian immigrants living in the UK. McQueen’s career has been rife with surprises of late, and we can’t wait to see where he takes us next - unless it’s “More Shame”.

Yes, this is cheating, but it’s my list, so deal. Enfants terrible Antonio Campos, Sean Durkin, and Josh Mond formed BorderLine Films in their twenties while attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the boys have knocked out two stone-cold masterpieces (Campos’s “Afterschool” and Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene”). It appears they’ve gone their separate ways, but the work continues to be nothing less than top-notch (Mond’s “James White” was one of the most underappreciated films of 2015, while Durkin’s superb “The Nest” got lost in the pandemic fog of 2020). These gentlemen do not, as yet, make cheerful films, but these are not cheerful times.

Sciamma has been a force in French cinema since her debut “Water Lilies”, a bruising coming-of-age drama about three teenaged friends heading in three very different directions at the precise moment hormones drive us all a little mad. Sciamma quickly became one of the most important voices in queer filmmaking with critically acclaimed character studies like “Tomboy” and “Girlhood”, but nothing could prepare us for her blazingly brilliant fourth feature, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”. It’s a passionate and profoundly erotic film that allows Sciamma to show off her sumptuous visual talents. These tales of forbidden love have a preordained trajectory that often blunts their emotional impact, but Sciamma overwhelms the senses; it’s a smoldering reverie that refuses to view its lovers as helpless victims. 

The most confounding filmmaker of this century, Dominik was treated as secondary to the success of his debut, “Chopper”. This was Eric Bana’s coming-out party, a bravura performance that, oddly, the actor hasn’t come close to matching over the last two decades. Dominik’s sophomore effort, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, revealed the Aussie director to be a visual poet of the highest order (with the noted assistance of cinematographer Roger Deakins). This lyric quality did not carry over to the gritty “Killing Them Softly”, which transplanted George V. Higgins’s Boston crime novel to post-Katrina New Orleans (and apparently shed over an hour in a Harvey Weinstein-supervised edit). Dominik’s fourth feature, “Blonde”, a Marilyn Monroe biopic based on the historical novel by Joyce Carol Oates, is allegedly being held back by Netflix due to its rough content (even though Oates raved over an early cut of the film). Controversy trails Dominik, but the movies have thus far delivered and then some. It’s just hard to figure out what he’s after.

Kaufman belongs to an elite group of screenwriters who, by dint of their highly specific voice, tend to overwhelm the vision of their directors - which is amazing given that he wrote two films apiece for music video brats Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. Thus, it surprised no one when Kaufman set out on his own with “Synecdoche, New York”, nor was it a shock that left to his own neurotic devices, he turned in a work wholly devoid of joy. Some found this unrelenting misery refreshing, but it’s hard to connect with an artist who seems resentful of his success. “Anomalisa” was no less miserable, but at least Kaufman reckoned with his depression via fanciful puppetry. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” brought it all home. Here, Kaufman examined to-the-grave marriage through the bizarre musical kaleidoscope of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”. It’s a tragicomic masterpiece that soars and crashes with baffling abandon. It’s Kaufman acknowledging that life can be pretty goddamn great - if only on a regional theater level - despite the fact that it’s going to end, and that end’s really going to suck.

Lonergan’s 21st century got off to a terrific start with “You Can Count on Me”, a finely nuanced drama about a brother and sister who’ve struggled to find their way in the world since losing their parents in a car crash when they were kids. His sophomore effort, “Margaret”, dealt head-on with the still-scabbing wound of 9/11 in New York City via a teenage girl’s coming of age, and, after a protracted legal battle that kept the film out of theaters for six years, earned critical acclaim despite its studio and producer doing everything in its power to bury it. Lonergan landed on his feet with “Manchester by the Sea”, a wise modern tragedy that levels with its audience. Sometimes there’s no catharsis to be found. You can’t always beat your demons. You can, however, learn to live with them.

The music video maestro who gave us the shifting-floor razzle-dazzle of Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” has turned out to be quite the unquantifiable filmmaker. 2000’s “Sexy Beast” is an existential British gangster flick in which happily stoned Ray Winstone is berated back into the business by an exceedingly profane Ben Kingsley. “Birth” is a twisted reincarnation romance between Nicole Kidman and a ten-year-old boy. “Under the Skin” is a mesmerizing sci-fi/horror masterpiece that finds an extraterrestrial Scarlett Johansson prowling the streets of Glasgow for male victims. Connective thematic tissue? Beats us. Next up is an adaptation of Martin Amis's Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest. Little is known about the cast, but we'll take new Glazer any way he serves it up.