I like Kurosawa for his cinematography, vision, and just the way he blocks scenes for films in general, but his films *do* drag. I also like Hitchcock and Welles, but of the two, I can only really watch Hitchcock again and again. Sidney Lumet is always great.
Nolan and Cuaron are my two favorite recent directors -- they deftly tread the line between auteur and the mainstream. I already made my appreciation thread for Alexander Payne.
Richard Linklater and David Lynch and the Coen Brothers <3 <3 <3
I'm not a big fan of Wes Anderson -- he's too uneven and, dare I say it, masturbatory. I loved Rushmore and liked Bottle Rocket, but The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums really meandered, largely in the name of packing in EXTRA QUIRKY for YOUR CINEMA DOLLAR.
I'm not a huge Scorsese fan. I liked Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, but I can pass on the rest. Same with Gilliam: he's too uneven -- he has some killer works like Brasil, and some turds like The Brothers Grimm. I can't decide if I liked or hated The Fisher King -- despite what the Academy thought, Robin Williams was NOT a good casting call.
I haven't seen much Cronenberg other than The Fly, eXistenZ, and Videodrome -- the latter two at TVC's prompting. He's suggested that I watch Herzog, and I probably need to -- it's kind of a gaping hole in my cinema education.
Tarantino is a one-trick pony (although he's good at that one trick) -- he's Kevin Smith for the teenaged grindhouse cinema set. Now that I think about it, it's unfair to call The Life Aquatic masturbatory when we have Kill fucking Bill 1 and 2 -- two terrible fucking movies for anyone but the biggest and flabbiest of Asian XXXTreme cinema nerds. Pulp Fiction was great, Jackie Brown was good, and Reservoir Dogs was awkward. I hold out hope for Death Proof based on folks' positive assessment of it -- although the fact that it is dialogue-heavy worries me, since I really had my fill of his brand of edgy snark with, well, ALL OF HIS PREVIOUS MOVIES WITH THE IRONIC EXCEPTION OF KILL BILL.
Spielberg sucks.
