Al Pacino as Michael Corleone looking out a window in The Godfather: Part II (1974).Image via Paramount Pictures
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Jeremy Urquhart
Published 59 minutes ago
Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He is also currently in the process of trying to become a Stephen King expert by reading all 2397 novels written by the author.
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Obviously, there were so many fantastically directed movies in the 20th century to make highlighting the best of the best an almost futile task, more so than doing it for the 21st century. At the time of writing, that century is still pretty young, while motion pictures existed for basically the entirety of the 20th century, and as early as the 1920s (maybe even the 1910s), there were already some genuinely great ones.
Also, what is good directing? Well, if everything comes together, and all the components of a film feel well-controlled or impressive in some way or another, then there was probably a good director doing exceptional work and ensuring the film they were in charge of was just all-around working. If a film looks, sounds, flows, and feels good, all the while having consistently good performances from actors with large and small parts alike, then it’s probably a sign of great directing. Also, for below, there’s a limit of one movie per director.
10 'Sunset Boulevard' (1950)
Image via Paramount Pictures
Sort of a film noir movie, Sunset Boulevard has the look of film noir, and some of the stylistic quirks, but it’s also a good deal funnier than most noir movies (albeit the comedy is very dark), and it’s also not really a crime/mystery story (but some of the story is mysterious, and a crime is committed). It’s more about the film industry, as well as a psychological drama focusing on an aging actress who seems convinced a comeback is just around the corner.
Sunset Boulevard is expertly acted, and it features one of the best screenplays Billy Wilder ever directed, for sure.
It looks at the hardships of working in the film industry, particularly as it relates to individuals having to go from acting in silent films to talkies, like a much more bitter Singin' in the Rain. Sunset Boulevard, in that sense, has a story that can be related to emotionally in other contexts; like, working some kind of job, only to be told that technology has changed your role, and thereby impacted your life. Also, Sunset Boulevard is expertly acted, and it features one of the best screenplays Billy Wilder ever directed, for sure (he co-wrote it with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr.).
9 'Metropolis' (1927)
Metropolis is the earliest film in this ranking, but make no mistake: it might be close to a century old, at the time of writing, but it’s still very easy to appreciate what an accomplishment it was on a filmmaking front. Fritz Lang had certainly helmed some ambitious silent epics before Metropolis, but never with quite as much skill as he did here, since this one went on to codify/define so many sci-fi ideas, narrative beats, and visuals.
A whole city is brought to life with very old-school special effects, but there’s still a certain wonder to seeing those cityscapes on screen. And the story here, told with some title cards and a whole lot of visuals/expressive acting, is simple but powerfully told and still resonant, with what it has to say about wealth inequality and class conflict. On every front, Metropolis is pretty much perfect, and rightly held up as an influential masterpiece of international cinema.
8 'The Exorcist' (1973)
Max von Sydow as a priest in The Exorcist (1973)Image via Warner Bros.
If you only ever watch one demonic possession movie, for whatever reason, then you should probably make it The Exorcist, which does that kind of horror so much better than just about anything else out there. It is, of course, eventually about an exorcism, but it builds slowly to that event, with the more understated horror and dread being just as effective as the more in-your-face, infamous, and messy moments of horror.
It's a fairly slow-paced movie, at times, but The Exorcist is always going somewhere, and the whole thing saw William Friedkin operating at the height of his powers. The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A. are comparably fantastic on a filmmaking front, but The Exorcist is probably his best film, and the one of his that feels least like it could’ve been made by anyone else.
7 '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968)
Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
It’s hard to single out one Stanley Kubrick movie as his best-directed, but if you had to do so, you may as well go with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which could be his most expansive, influential, and singular film. It’s about the early stages of humanity, the near-future, and then what the far-future for the human race could look like, being a movie that aims to explore different stages of evolution.
You need a long runtime to do that convincingly, but as a director, Kubrick also makes this whole process feel patiently paced. 2001: A Space Odyssey feels and unfolds like no other movie out there, science fiction or otherwise, and though it can be a lot to handle on one watch, reading theories about what it all means, and rewatching it, ends up being immensely rewarding. You do have to work to fully appreciate this one, but it’s well worth it in the end.
6 'Goodfellas' (1990)
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Before he did some of the best directing of the 21st century, Martin Scorsese also did some of the best directing of the 20th century, with his first feature film being in 1967, and his first great ones coming out in the 1970s (namely, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver). Still, the film of his made before 2000 that stands as the best of them would have to be Goodfellas, which is the quintessential gangster movie, or would be, if not for a pair of gangster movies about a certain someone with the offers you can’t refuse.
Look, if you want to know why Martin Scorsese might be the best director of all time, you can get a pretty good idea of that just from watching Goodfellas. Goodfellas alone puts him right up there, and then if you watch his other various masterpieces, you might see why pretty much no one else in cinema history has ever done it quite like him.
5 'Citizen Kane' (1941)
Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in 'Citizen Kane'Image via RKO Radio Pictures
So, Citizen Kane is that movie that people say is really good. That’s what you hear, at least, when you start getting into cinema. You might be interested in checking out decades-old movies for the first time (at least the ones that aren’t timeless works of animation), and there’s still all this hype around a movie about some citizen named Kane or something. “Oh, it’s a drama? And I know the ending because Family Guy spoiled it? Sure, whatever…”
Maybe you put off watching it. But you keep hearing about it. You cave. You watch Citizen Kane. And by gosh, if it isn't one of the most ahead-of-its-time movies ever made. The stuff Orson Welles was doing both in front of and behind the camera, all at the same time, giving a complex performance and getting visuals, framing, wild transitions that all looked the way they did. Citizen Kane is perfectly directed, and was one of the earliest films to be perfectly directed and still feel perfectly directed pretty much by today’s standards, too. The hype? You might now believe it.
4 'The Godfather Part II' (1974)
Michael Corleone holds Fredo by the face at a party and stares at him intently in The Godfather Part II, 1974.Image via Paramount Pictures
After The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola seemed willing to go bigger and better with his sequel, The Godfather Part II, and did that, in part, by making it more than just a sequel. The Godfather Part II goes back in time to explore Vito’s arrival in America, contrasting the building of his empire in the past with the overall collapse of the family business in the present, now that it’s all being overseen by Vito’s adult son, Michael.
Naturally, that makes The Godfather Part II darker and more emotionally complex, as well as all playing out on a grander scale, with the flashbacks and present scenes being cut between expertly. It’s a movie that’s doing a lot, and it does a lot over a hefty runtime that exceeds three hours, but “control” is yet another word worth applying to a film here; Coppola always seems in control, as opposed to his later film, Apocalypse Now (which is itself kind of a masterpiece, albeit maybe in a partly accidental manner, or at least in a very different/less traditional way).
3 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' (1966)
Image via Produzioni Europee Associati
Though he was an Italian filmmaker, Sergio Leone might well still have been the king of the Western genre, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is probably the easiest film to point to in order to argue/demonstrate why. This one is narratively simple, with three men deceiving and racing their way to a buried fortune in the desert, but it’s also such a stylishly put-together movie, and it’s willing to go increasingly grand in scale with almost every new scene.
It's a joy to watch, and the fact that it all ends up at one of the best final sequences in cinema history certainly doesn’t hurt, either. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly shows a director in total control of everything, all the while also willing to take risks that just keep on paying off, and the resulting film isn't just one of the best-looking Westerns of all time, but simply one of the best Westerns of all time, like, in general.
2 'Vertigo' (1958)
Kim Novak standing under a bridge in Alfred Hitchcock's VertigoImage via Paramount Pictures
Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece was… well, Alfred Hitchcock made a few masterpieces. But his most masterful movie was probably Vertigo, which is about a man agreeing to monitor the activities of a friend’s wife, who’s very mysterious, but then the man slowly starts to develop feelings for her that start as romantic, but eventually reveal themselves to be something potentially darker.
It really does go to some psychologically upsetting and intense territory for a film that’s close to 70 years old, and Vertigo was also one of those forward-thinking films that might've been a bit too much for people at the time, and then better appreciated by viewers years later. The consensus seems to be that Vertigo is Hitchcock’s most honest, personal, and mature film, and there remains something uniquely hypnotic and unnerving about the whole thing.
1 'Ran' (1985)
A samurai on horseback in Ran (1985)Image via Toho
In 1954, Akira Kurosawa directed Seven Samurai, which could’ve deservedly taken the top spot here. But then just over three decades later, Kurosawa arguably outdid himself with the similarly epic Ran… actually, Ran was probably more of an epic. Like, Seven Samurai was longer, and maybe a bit more emotionally varied and well-rounded, but Ran had bigger battle sequences, sets, and an even weightier story on its mind.
With Ran, you get both a family drama and a full-out war-filled tragedy, and things escalate slowly but surely throughout, with there always being a tension between the beautifully composed images and the increasing chaos defining everyone’s lives. As far as epic war movies, or just massive productions in general go, it’s hard to imagine many others being as well-handled by their director as Ran (honorable mention, though, to the 1960s USSR version of War and Peace; what Sergei Bondarchuk was able to do there, as a director, was also astounding).
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Release Date
December 20, 1985
Runtime
160 Minutes
Director
Akira Kurosawa
Writers
Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide
Cast
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Tatsuya Nakadai
Lord Hidetora Ichimonji
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Akira Terao
Taro Takatora Ichimonji
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