ARTHOUSE DIRECTORS:
1. Richard Linklater
Recent Highlights: A Scanner Darkly, Fast Food Nation, Before Sunset
A role model for indie filmmakers who follow the one-for-them, one-for-me strategy, Linklater has slalomed between Hollywood and the art house—between School of Rock and Before Sunrise—with surprising ease. This year he aimed right up the middle with not one but two films. We’d wait for his movies, but we’re glad we don’t have to.
2. Michel Gondry
Recent Highlights: The Science of Sleep, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Upcoming: Be Kind Rewind
Innovative, quirky and constantly surprising, this year Gondry applied the directing skills that thrilled audiences in Eternal Sunshine to screenwriting with Sleep, his ethereal film exploring a young man’s dreamscapes. Always willing to try something new—whether in film, art or his beloved music videos—he continues to exceed visual expectations.
3. Ang Lee
Recent Highlights: Brokeback Mountain
Upcoming: Lust, Caution
It seemed like a strange idea for a Taiwanese-American director previously known best for a magical kung-fu film to make a movie about gay cowboys. But it no longer seems quite so strange. In fact, most filmgoers will happily trust Ang Lee with any story he cares to tell, including his next (Lust, Caution), a Mandarin-language spy thriller set in WWII-era Shanghai.
4. Christopher Guest
Recent Highlights: For Your Consideration, A Mighty Wind
Guest, who became British royalty in 1996 upon the death of his father, the 4th Baron Haden-Guest, has long been regarded as such in the comedic realm. With his performance in This Is Spinal Tap—and later with his own films Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and now For Your Consideration—he brought the concept of unscripted dialogue to the screen in an unforgettable way, surrounding himself with top-shelf improvisers and allowing the humor to flow out of each actor’s phenomenal comedic instincts.
5. Alejandro González Iñárritu
Recent Highlights: Babel, 21 Grams
When Iñárritu moved his films from Mexico to the States, he brought their puzzle-like plots along, too. But this year his characters outgrew his structural ingenuity—he’s become a director of actors, not just situations. Babel—his fourth collaboration with writer Guillermo Arriaga—is his best work to date, leaving us eager to see what’s next.
6. Alfonso Cuarón
Recent Highlights: Children of Men; paris, je t’aime
Upcoming: México ‘68, The History of Love, The Memory of Running
With only two films to his credit between 1999 and 2005 (the Oscar-winning Y tu mamá también and box-office biggie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), director Cuarón began making up for lost time this year with two excellent new projects, and he’s got three more on the way, including Children of Men, which stars enduring indie favorites Julianne Moore, Clive Owen and Michael Caine.
7. Kevin Macdonald
Recent Highlights: The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void
Upcoming: The 28th Amendment
Having earned his stripes as a documentarian, Oscar winner Macdonald successfully branched out into fiction filmmaking with the fact-based Last King of Scotland, about a Scottish doctor who falls into the orbit of manipulative, bloodthirsty Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Skillfully evoking a lost era of African optimism and squandered opportunity, Macdonald has found a new way to document the truth—through fiction.
8. Spike Lee
Recent Highlights: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Inside Man
Upcoming: Selling Time, NoLa
It’s been 20 years since She’s Gotta Have It, and almost as many since he proved to be a major talent with Do the Right Thing. But if we needed a reminder that Lee still has his finger on the pulse of urban America, we got it, in an urgent, angry, loving tribute to the people of New Orleans. From a proud New Yorker, no less.
9. Pedro Almodóvar
Recent Highlights: Volver, Bad Education
Expanding from his early stint as a creator of campy, outrageously funny comedies, Almodóvar has grown impressively as a filmmaker, getting deeper and more moving without losing his charm. All About My Mother and Talk to Her led the charge; his latest, Volver, won awards at Cannes for best screenplay and best actress (shared by the film’s entire ensemble).
10. Stephen Frears
Recent Highlights: The Queen, Mrs. Henderson Presents
Getting the best performance of Jack Black’s career in High Fidelity is one thing, but doing the same for Helen Mirren is quite a bigger accomplishment, considering the latter’s turn in Calendar Girls. Frears’ latest comes on the heels of a collaboration with another estimable British dame, Judi Dench, in Mrs. Henderson Presents.
11. Werner Herzog
Recent Highlights: Rescue Dawn, The Wild Blue Yonder, Grizzly Man, The White Diamond
Herzog—once best known as a maker of hypnotic, beautiful films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God—has reinvented himself in recent years as an iconoclastic documentarian. His 2005 film, Grizzly Man, was his best effort in years, a spellbinding account of a tragically misguided man’s desire to commune with a decidedly unfriendly natural world.