Last Updated on 16 September 2023

The following list is the Official Definitive List of the 400 best movie directors ever. I averaged 34 different ranked lists of “best directors of all time” to get this definitive compilation.  See my Methodology page for the research process that was used, including links to all 34 lists that were averaged.

1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Steven Spielberg
3. Stanley Kubrick
4. Martin Scorsese
5. Akira Kurosawa
6. Francis Ford Coppola
7. Orson Welles
8. Quentin Tarantino
9. Ingmar Bergman
10. John Ford
11. David Lynch
12. Federico Fellini
13. Billy Wilder
14. Woody Allen
15. Ridley Scott
16. Jean-Luc Godard
17. The Coen Brothers
18. Clint Eastwood
19. Charlie Chaplin
20. James Cameron
21. Christopher Nolan
22. David Fincher
23. Roman Polanski
24. Andrei Tarkovsky
25. David Lean
26. François Truffaut
27. Fritz Lang
28. Sergio Leone
29. Paul Thomas Anderson
30. Tim Burton
31. Howard Hawks
32. Jean Renoir
33. Luis Buñuel
34. Peter Jackson
35. George Lucas
36. Sidney Lumet
37. Buster Keaton
38. Frank Capra
39. Terrence Malick
40. Brian De Palma
41. Robert Altman
42. John Huston
43. Spike Lee
44. Yasujirō Ozu
45. Sergei Eisenstein
46. Ang Lee
47. Michelangelo Antonioni
48. Pedro Almodóvar
49. Milos Forman
50. Werner Herzog
51. Robert Zemeckis
52. Alfonso Cuarón
53. Wes Anderson
54. F.W. Murnau
55. Oliver Stone
56. David Cronenberg
57. Guillermo del Toro
58. Elia Kazan
59. William Wyler
60. D.W. Griffith
61. Steven Soderbergh
62. The Russo Brothers
63. Hayao Miyazaki
64. Terry Gilliam
65. Satyajit Ray
66. Lars von Trier
67. Carl Theodor Dreyer
68. Michael Mann
69. Alejandro G. Iñárritu
70. Robert Bresson
71. Bernardo Bertolucci
72. Ron Howard
73. Michael Haneke
74. Sam Peckinpah
75. Ernst Lubitsch
76. Edgar Wright
77. John Carpenter
78. Abbas Kiarostami
79. Chantal Akerman
80. Kar-Wai Wong
81. Mel Brooks
82. Roberto Rossellini
83. Kathryn Bigelow
84. John Cassavetes
85. Richard Linklater
86. George Cukor
87. Sam Raimi
88. Mike Nichols
89. Bong Joon Ho
90. John Michael McDonagh
91. M. Night Shyamalan
92. Sofia Coppola
93. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
94. Denis Villeneuve
95. Michael Powell
96. Michael Curtiz
97. Vittorio De Sica
98. Rob Reiner
99. Victor Fleming
100. Peter Weir
101. Krzysztof Kieslowski
102. Agnès Varda
103. Danny Boyle
104. Wim Wenders
105. Sam Mendes
106. William Friedkin
107. Luchino Visconti
108. Jacques Tati
109. Vincente Minnelli
110. Jonathan Demme
111. Darren Aronofsky
112. Jon Favreau
113. Mel Gibson
114. Jane Campion
115. Tony Scott
116. Josef von Sternberg
117. Nicholas Ray
118. Max Ophüls
119. John Hughes
120. Kenji Mizoguchi
121. Jean-Pierre Melville
122. Taika Waititi
123. Cecil B. DeMille
124. Alain Resnais
125. Sydney Pollack
126. Preston Sturges
127. Michael Bay
128. Otto Preminger
129. Louis Malle
130. Powell and Pressburger
131. The Wachowskis
132. Yimou Zhang
133. Gus Van Sant
134. Guy Ritchie
135. Spike Jonze
136. J.J. Abrams
137. Jim Jarmusch
138. Paul Verhoeven
139. Marcel Carné
140. Arthur Penn
141. Béla Tarr
142. George A. Romero
143. David Yates
144. Douglas Sirk
145. Ida Lupino
146. Peter Bogdanovich
147. Anthony Minghella
148. Henri-Georges Clouzot
149. Pier Paolo Pasolini
150. Penny Marshall
151. Gene Kelly
152. Mike Leigh
153. Wolfgang Petersen
154. Alexander Payne
155. Luc Besson
156. Carol Reed
157. Dziga Vertov
158. Barry Levinson
159. Fred Zinnemann
160. Robert Wise
161. Éric Rohmer
162. Todd Haynes
163. Ryan Coogler
164. David O. Russell
165. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
166. Raoul Walsh
167. Bob Fosse
168. Upendra
169. Robert Aldrich
170. John Woo
171. Erich von Stroheim
172. King Vidor
173. Lois Weber
174. George Stevens
175. Stanley Donen
176. George Miller
177. Greta Gerwig
178. Andrzej Wajda
179. Aki Kaurismäki
180. Jacques Demy
181. Todd Phillips
182. Fernando Meirelles
183. Don Siegel
184. Wes Craven
185. Nicolas Roeg
186. Ava DuVernay
187. Ken Loach
188. Amy Heckerling
189. Michael Moore
190. Alan J. Pakula
191. James Whale
192. Chris Columbus
193. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
194. Nora Ephron
195. René Clair
196. Cameron Crowe
197. Jean Cocteau
198. Barry Jenkins
199. Michael Cimino
200. Norman Jewison
201. Jean Vigo
202. Bryan Singer
203. John McTiernan
204. Dario Argento
205. Lukas Moodysson
206. Mira Nair
207. Jordan Peele
208. Richard Attenborough
209. Leo McCarey
210. Samuel Fuller
211. Terence Davies
212. Chris Marker
213. Joel Schumacher
214. Claire Denis
215. John Boorman
216. John Schlesinger
217. Takeshi Kitano
218. James Gunn
219. Frank Darabont
220. Hal Ashby
221. Richard Donner
222. Georg Wilhelm Pabst
223. James Mangold
224. John Sturges
225. Steve McQueen
226. Ming-liang Tsai
227. Lewis Milestone
228. Lynne Ramsay
229. Ivan Reitman
230. Jacques Tourneur
231. Alan Parker
232. Claude Chabrol
233. Tod Browning
234. Georges Méliès
235. James L. Brooks
236. Brad Bird
237. John Lasseter
238. Blake Edwards
239. Shohei Imamura
240. John Frankenheimer
241. Jules Dassin
242. Gareth Edwards
243. Theo Angelopoulos
244. Peter Greenaway
245. Kenneth Branagh
246. Stanley Kramer
247. Mikhail Kalatozov
248. Roland Emmerich
249. George Roy Hill
250. Joe Wright
251. René Clément
252. Jon Watts
253. Rian Johnson
254. Jacques Rivette
255. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
256. James Wan
257. Frank Borzage
258. Aleksandr Sokurov
259. Anthony Mann
260. Tony Richardson
261. Yorgos Lanthimos
262. Edward Zwick
263. Laurence Olivier
264. Lasse Hallström
265. James Ivory
266. Victor Sjöström
267. Nancy Meyers
268. Michael Winterbottom
269. Pierre Coffin
270. Roy Andersson
271. Sergei Parajanov
272. Sam Wood
273. Park Chan-wook
274. Emir Kusturica
275. Henry King
276. Gore Verbinski
277. Hiroshi Teshigahara
278. Patty Jenkins
279. Franklin J. Schaffner
280. Joseph Losey
281. Alice Guy-Blaché
282. Joss Whedon
283. Chuck Jones
284. Robert J. Flaherty
285. Oscar Micheaux
286. Walter Salles
287. Errol Morris
288. Leni Riefenstahl
289. Mervyn LeRoy
290. Pawel Pawlikowski
291. Francis Lawrence
292. Kenji Mizoguchi
293. Edward Yang
294. Gaspar Noé
295. Terence Young
296. John Singleton
297. Mark Waters
298. Noah Baumbach
299. Chris Renaud
300. Manoel de Oliveira
301. Rouben Mamoulian
302. Konstantin Stanislavski
303. Claude Lanzmann
304. Franco Zeffirelli
305. Takashi Miike
306. Zack Snyder
307. The Dardenne Brothers
308. Robert Rodriguez
309. Curtis Hanson
310. Walter Hill
311. Mike Newell
312. John Landis
313. Abel Gance
314. Damien Chazelle
315. Jerry Lewis
316. Andrew Dominik
317. Aleksandr Dovzhenko
318. Kyle Balda
319. Lee Unkrich
320. Roger Corman
321. Kevin Smith
322. Nagisa Ôshima
323. Baz Luhrmann
324. Martin Campbell
325. Alexander Mackendrick
326. Paul Greengrass
327. Cary Joji Fukunaga
328. Carlos Saldanha
329. The Safdie Brothers
330. Bill Condon
331. Stephen Frears
332. Justin Lin
333. Paul Schrader
334. Walt Disney
335. Henry Hathaway
336. Jan Svankmajer
337. Sergio Corbucci
338. Samira Makhmalbaf
339. Tom McGrath
340. Richard Brooks
341. Martin Ritt
342. Robert Rossen
343. Antoine Fuqua
344. Andrew Stanton
345. Masaki Kobayashi
346. Mario Bava
347. Michael Apted
348. Vera Chytilová
349. Alejandro Jodorowsky
350. Henry Selick
351. Shawn Levy
352. Bertrand Tavernier
353. Leos Carax
354. Francesco Rosi
355. Tobe Hooper
356. Chris Buck
357. Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack
358. Roger Allers
359. John Sayles
360. Robert Siodmak
361. Jennifer Lee
362. Tinto Brass
363. Robert Hamer
364. Robert Stevenson
365. Colin Trevorrow
366. David Hand
367. Anatole Litvak
368. Kelly Reichardt
369. Andrew Adamson
370. Edward Dmytryk
371. Lindsay Anderson
372. Tom Hooper
373. Richard Fleischer
374. Conrad Vernon
375. Adam McKay
376. Michel Gondry
377. Eric Darnell
378. Miklós Jancsó
379. Barry Sonnenfeld
380. Bruce Beresford
381. Alexander Korda
382. John Waters
383. Chloé Zhao
384. Kenneth Lonergan
385. John G. Avildsen
386. Ishirô Honda
387. Hark Tsui
388. Jon Turteltaub
389. Melvin Van Peebles
390. Amy Poehler
391. Andrea Arnold
392. Pete Docter
393. F. Gary Gray
394. Joseph Kosinski
395. Hsiao-Hsien Hou
396. Roger Vadim
397. Kaige Chen
398. Matt Reeves
399. Isao Takahata
400. Jake Kasdan