Top 50 directors of all time (updated January 2013)

1.  Roberto Rossellini
Rossellini is the cinema's most enigmatic director - a dilettante who strayed in its path and applied a curiosity and expansiveness to it that left everyone bamboozled. Rigorous yet "amateur", his films are open and mysterious - and therefore inexhaustible. Best films: Viaggio in Italia, Paisa, Roma Città Aperta.

2.  Robert Bresson
Taking his cue from painting rather than theatre, Bresson created a stylised cinema that evaded dramatic affectation and captured the human spirit in its pure state. The despair and suffering that dominate the films are overrided by beauty and grace. Best films: Au Hasard Balthazar, Pickpocket, Mouchette.

3.  Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematic post-modernist, intellectual trouble-maker and elegiac solitaire, Godard is a wonderful figure, still actively working away, counfounding his audiences. His films are jazzy and excited, sometimes great fun, and sometimes truly sublime. Best films: Je vous salue Marie, Sauve qui peut (la vie), Soft and Hard.

4.  Frank Borzage
Not fully appreciated in his time, Borzage now stands as the cinema's one great exponent of transcendental love. Directed with a light touch (the performances are often very natural), Borzage's films are surprising and moving, and sometimes downright surreal. Best films: Seventh Heaven, Little Man What Now?, The River.

5.  Chantal Akerman
Akerman is a dream auteur, the way she crosses from experimental narrative to essay film to documentary to big-budget spectacular. If not quite a feminist, the passion of women has been an abiding theme for her, resulting in some difficult but ecstatic films. Best films: Toute une nuit, Jeanne Dielman, Golden Eighties.

6.  Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini packed a punch in his brief 15-year film career, bringing to it his experience as a writer, journalist, communist, homosexual. But he respected cinema as a medium in its own right, and with great intuition created some astonishingly brutal and poetic works. Best films: Salò, Teorema, Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo.

7.  Jean Renoir
Struggling in the late '20s, Renoir then produced the greatest body of work from a director in the space of a decade the cinema has known. He was a humanist with a large heart, but he was also a free spirit - a gorgeous combination. Best films: La Règle du Jeu, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Boudu sauvé des eaux.

8.  Michelangelo Antonioni
Antonioni's greatest attributes are his intelligence and his eye, marking even his most despairing films with a nobility and beauty. He also constructs narrative brilliantly, with wonder, often upsetting conventional structures. Best films: Identificazione di una donna, L'Eclisse, L'Avventura.

9.  John Cassavetes
A chronicler of pain and joy, Cassavetes often neglected even basic technical fundamentals, let alone broader formal matters. But in the face of the tremendous feeling he created, this criticism is beside the point. Best films: Love Streams, A Woman Under the Influence, Minnie and Moskowitz.

10.  Yasujiro Ozu
Ozu's work is as eternal as the sky and as deep as the ocean. There are early genre pieces, but his mature work is all about the everyday - and you will not see more compassionate or tender studies of people and their lives anywhere else. Best films: Tokyo Story, An Autumn Afternoon, Late Spring.

11.  Luis Buñuel 12.  Philippe Garrel 13.  Eric Rohmer 14.  Frank Capra 15.  Wong Kar-wai 16.  Abbas Kiarostami 17.  Jean Eustache 18.  Carl Theodor Dreyer 19.  Martin Scorsese 20.  Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger 21.  Jacques Rivette 22.  Orson Welles 23.  Theo Angelopoulos 24.  Alfred Hitchcock 25.  Jacques Demy 26.  Alan Clarke 27.  Andrei Tarkovsky 28.  Ingmar Bergman 29.  Bruno Dumont 30.  Claude Chabrol 31.  Max Ophüls 32.  Mike Leigh 33.  Ken Loach 34.  John Ford 35.  Jean-Marie Straub 36.  Charles Chaplin 37.  Douglas Sirk 38.  R. W. Fassbinder 39.  Tony Gatlif 40.  Jerry Lewis 41.  Chris Marker 42.  Werner Herzog 43.  Abel Ferrara 44.  Ermanno Olmi 45.  Kenji Mizoguchi 46.  Jacques Tati 47.  Jean Vigo 48.  Claire Denis 49.  Michael Haneke 50.  Wim Wenders See also     Top 50 films of all time