Director Point Totals in Critics Top 1000

I totalled up all the films for each listing in the critics top 1000, and these are the resulting point totals, not that I agree with the results. I decided to go to 120 rather than 100 because of some of those just out of the 100, like Yimou, Cimino, Campion, Reifenstahl, Eastwood.

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Photo courtesy of FanPix.com

      Director                       Points
    1.Hitchcock, Alfred - US          10091
    2.Ford, John - US                  9836
    3.Buñuel, Luis - Spain             9305
    4.Godard, Jean-Luc - France        8474
    5.Kubrick, Stanley - US-UK         7974
    6.Fellini, Federico - Italy        7698
    7.Kurosawa, Akira - Japan          7629
    8.Hawks, Howard - US               7504
    9.Bergman, Ingmar - Sweden         7191
   10.Chaplin, Charles - US            6896
   11.Powell, Michael - UK             6452
   12.Renoir, Jean - France            6270
   13.Bresson, Robert - France         6165
   14.Lang, Fritz - US                 6014
   15.Scorsese, Martin - US            5809
   16.Welles, Orson - US               5757
   17.Visconti, Luchino - Italy        5703
   18.Eisenstein, Sergei - Russia      5497
   19.Tarkovsky, Andrei - Russia       5259
   20.Keaton, Buster - US              5155
   21.Rossellini, Roberto -  Italy     5098
   22.Antonioni, Michelangelo - Italy  4838
   23.Wilder, Billy - US               4726
   24.Mizoguchi, Kenji - Japan         4477
   25.Spielberg, Steven - US           4456
   26.Dreyer, Carl - Denmark           4442
   27.Truffaut, François - France      4350
   28.Lubitsch, Ernst - US             4271
   29.Ophüls, Max - France             4268
   30.Murnau, F.W. - US                4266
   31.Ray, Satyajit - India            4214
   32.Coppola, Francis - US            4196
   33.Huston, John - US                4152
   34.Resnais, Alain - France          4131
   35.Cassavetes, John - US            3931
   36.Lean, David - UK                 3911
   37.Allen, Woody - US                3793
   38.Altman, Robert - US              3670
   39.Ozu, Yasujiro - Japan            3567
   40.Fassbinder, Rainer Werner – Ger. 3534
   41.von Sternberg, Josef - US        3450
   42.Ray, Nicholas - US               3424
   43.Sturges, Preston - US            3378
   44.Sirk, Douglas - US               3336
   45.Pasolini, Pier Paolo - Italy     3182
   46.Kieslowski, Krszystof - Poland   3165
   47.Peckinpah, Sam - US              3029
   48.McCarey, Leo - US                2985
   49.Kiarostami, Abbas - Iran         2953
   50.De Sica, Vittorio - Italy        2952
   51.Minnelli, Vincente - US          2944
   52.Kazan, Elia - US                 2923
   53.Griffith, D.W. - US              2918
   54.Polanski, Roman - UK             2912
   55.Bertolucci, Bernardo - Italy     2872
   56.Wenders, Wim - Germany           2842
   57.Leone, Sergio - Italy-Spain      2627
   58.Forman, Milos - US               2624
   59.Capra, Frank - US                2622
   60.Lynch, David - US                2596
   61.von Stroheim, Erich - Germany    2491
   62.Cukor, George - US               2490
   63.Donen, Stanley - US              2423
   64.Vidor, King - US                 2414
   65.Wyler, William - US              2407
   66.Tati, Jacques - France           2368
   67.Scott, Ridley - UK               2338
   68.Tourneur, Jacques - UK           2264
   69.Melville, Jean-Pierre - France   2240
   70.Hou Hsiao-Hsien - Taiwan         2162
   71.Cocteau, Jean - France           2146
   72.Lumet, Sidney - US               2141
   73.Herzog, Werner  -   Germany      2138
   74.Coen, Joel and Ethan - US        2090
   75.Curtiz, Michael – US             2056
   76.Rohmer, Eric – France            1978
   77.Demy, Jacques - France           1971
   78.Malick, Terrence - US            1953
   79.Fleming, Victor - US             1898
   80.Reed, Carol - UK                 1866
   81.Cameron, James - US              1852
   82.Roeg, Nicolas - UK               1848
   83.Rocha, Glauber - Brazil          1810
   84.Stevens, George – US             1808
   85.Wong Kar-Wai - Hong Kong         1802
   86.Vigo, Jean – France              1765
   87.Flaherty, Robert - US            1756
   88.De Palma, Brian - US             1755
   89.Wise, Robert - US                1740
   90.Carné, Marcel - France           1711
   91.Mankiewicz, Joseph L. - US       1706
   92.Sharpsteen, Ben – US             1699
   93.Clair, René - France             1698
   94.Pabst, G.W. – Germany            1697
   95.Marker, Chris - France           1629
   96.Rivette, Jacques - France        1517
   97.Lucas, George - US               1482
   98.Tarantino, Quentin - US          1471
   99.Jarmusch, Jim - US               1440
   100.Whale, James - US               1432
   101.Romero, George A. - US          1407
   102.Gilliam, Terry – UK             1346
   103.Weir, Peter – Australia         1337
   104.Cronenberg, David - Canada      1325
   105.Angelopoulos, Theo - Greece     1301
   106.Fosse, Bob - US                 1296
   107.Clouzot, Henri-Georges - France 1259
   108.Jennings, Humphrey - UK         1255
   109.Riefenstahl, Leni - Germany     1230
   110.Campion, Jane - Australia       1227
   111.Eastwood, Clint - US            1225
   112.Cimino, Michael - US            1220
   113.Reiner, Rob - US                1209
   114.Walsh, Raoul - US               1192
   115.Zhang Yimou - Japan-China       1183
   116.Zinnemann, Fred - US            1172
   117.Friedkin, William - US          1150
   118.Edwards, Blake - US             1098
   119.Hand, David - US                1079
   120.Parajanov, Sergei - USSR        1071

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These are interesting results to say the least. I've always thought of Hitchcock as more of a popular than artistic director. I'm always surprised by the admiration for Godard - for me he's akin to root canal work, ie 'painful to sit through'. At least Kubrick is near the top (probably my favorite), and Scorsese is just ahead of Welles - yippee! He has a much longer and valuable filmography already, and is still active.

Glad that Buster Keaton showed so well, and Micheal Powell (11th), and that Spielberg is top 25 also. Shouldn't Billy Wilder be a little higher than 23rd though? I always find Chaplin ranked to highly also, and Howard Hawks - he's ahead of William Wyler? Are you kidding?

David Lean is too low at 36, and Elia Kazan is way too low at 52. WHO the heck is Ben Sharpsteen to come in 92? David Cronenberg, too high at 104th, in spite of Dead Ringers - he's ahead of Campion, Eastwood, Friedkin, Reifenstahl, Yimou, and Zinnemann!

"That's just my opinion, I could be wrong!"

Note: Once again, The Critics 1000 list we used was the one at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Director Film Counts in the Critics 1000

Directors with the most films in the critics top 1000.


Top Ten:
1. John Ford (18)
2. Fritz Lang (16)
3. Luis Bunuel (15)
4. Alfred Hitchcock (14)
5-6. Ingmar Bergman (13), Jean-Luc Godard (13)
7. Federico Fellini (12)
8-10. Howard Hawks (11), Stanley Kubrick (11), Akira Kurosawa (11)

10 each: Chaplin, Mizoguchi, J.Renoir
9 each: Scorsese, Visconti, Powell (9 total, 7 w Pressburger)
8 each: Allen, Altman, Bresson, Huston, Rossellini, von Sternberg, Welles, Wilder
7 each: Bertolucci, Cassavetes, Kieslowski, Lubitsch, Lynch, Ophuls, Ozu, Peckinpah, Rohmer, Powell & Pressburger, Spielberg, Tarkovsky, Trauffaut

Alphabetical List, four or more films
Total films in the top 1000, those 86 with 4+, represents 561 films. Followed by total in the top 200, then the [highest ranked film]

Allen (8) – 2 [#113: Manhattan]
Almodovar (4) [#635: All About My Mother]
Altman (8) – 2 [#67: Nashville]
Antonioni (6) – 3 [#38: L’avventura]
Bergman (13) – 5 [#40: Persona]
Bertolucci (7) – 1 [#65: The Conformist, photo right]
Bresson (8) – 3 [#61: Au hasard Balthazar]
Buñuel (15) – 7 [#68: Viridiana]
Capra (6) – 2 [#45: It’s a Wonderful Life]
Cassavetes (7) – 1 [#156: A Woman Under the Influence]
Chaplin (10) – 4 [#23: City Lights]
Clair (4) [#275: Le Million]
Cocteau, Jean (4) [#196: La Belle et la bête]
Coen Bros (5) [#288: Fargo]
Coppola (5) – 4 [#6: The Godfather]
Cukor (5) – 1 [#142: The Philadelphia Story]
De Sica (4) – 2 [#14: The Bicycle Thief]
Demy, Jacques (4) [#248: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg]
Donen (4) w Kelly (2:] – 1 [#11: Singin’ in the Rain]
Dreyer (5) – 4 [#17: The Passion of Joan d’Arc]
Eisenstein (6) – 3 [#8: Battleship Potemkin]
Fassbinder (6) – 1 [#186: Ali-Fear Grips the Soul]
Fellini (12) – 5 [#5: 8 ½]
Flaherty, Rob't (4) [#210: Nanook of the North]
Ford (18) – 6 [#7: The Searchers]
Forman (4) – 1 [#131: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, photo rt]
Godard (13) – 4 [#33: Breathless]
Griffith (5) – 3 [#51: Intolerance]
Hawks (11) – 4 [#63: Rio Bravo]
Herzog (5) – 1 [#91: Aguirre-The Wrath of God]
Hitchcock (14) – 5 [#2: Vertigo]
Hou Hsiao-Hsien (4) [#287: The Time to Live and the Time to Die]
Huston, J (8) – 2 [#111: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre]
Kazan (6) – 1 [#104: On the Waterfront]
Keaton (7) – 2 [#30: The General]
Kiarostami (6) – 1 [#191: Close-Up]
Kieslowski (7) – 1 [#132: Dekalog]
Kubrick (11) – 6 [#4: 2001-A Space Odyssey]
Kurosawa (11) – 4 [#9: Seven Samurai, photo right]
Lang, F (16) – 2 [#53: M]
Lean (6) – 2 [#13: Lawrence of Arabia]
Lubitsch (7) – 2 [#71: To Be or Not To Be]
Lumet (4) [#283: Network]
Lynch (7) – 1 [#107: Blue Velvet]
Mankiewicz (4) – 1 [#72: All About Eve]
Mann, A (4) [#589: Man of the West]
McCarey (4) – 1 [#103: Duck Soup]
Melville, Jean-P (6) [#280: Le Samourai]
Minnelli (5) – 1 [#157: The Band Wagon]
Mizoguchi (10) – 2 [#54: Ugetsu Monogatari]
Murnau, F.W. (6) – 3 [#12: Sunrise]
Ophüls, Max (7) – 2 [#77: Letter From an Unknown Woman]
Ozu, Yasujiro (7) – 2 [#10: Tokyo Story]
Pabst (4) – 1 [#189: Pandora’s Box]
Pasolini (5) – 1 [#159: Gospel According to St. Matthew, photo rt]
Peckinpah (7) – 1 [#158: The Wild Bunch]
Polanski (5) – 1 [#36: Chinatown]
Powell & Pressburger (7) – 4 [#126: A Matter of Life and Death]
Ray, Nicholas (6) [#241: Johnny Guitar]
Ray, Satyajit (6) – 3 [#59: Pather Panchali]
Renoir, Jean (10) – 3 [#3: The Rules of the Game]
Resnais (6) – 2 [#89: Last Year at Marienbad]
Rivette, Jacques (4) – 1 [#181: Celine and Julie Go Boating]
Roeg, Nicolas (4) – 2 [#136: Don’t Look Now]
Rohmer, Eric (7) [#278: My Night at Maud’s]
Rossellini (8) – 3 [#86: Voyage in Italy]
Scorsese (9) – 4 [#18: Raging Bull]
Scott, Ridley (4) – 1 [#46: Blade Runner]
Sirk (6) – 1 [#199: Written on the Wind]
Spielberg (7) – 3 [#106: Jaws]
Sturges, Preston (5) – 3 [#114: The Lady Eve]
Tarkovsky (7) – 3 [#41: Andrei Rublev]
Tourneur, Jacques (4) [#117: Out of the Past, photo right]
Truffaut (7) – 2 [#42: Jules et Jim]
Vidor, King (6) – 1 [#178: The Crowd]
Visconti (9) – 3 [#66: The Leopard]
von Sternberg, Josef (8) [#255: Blue Angel]
von Stroheim, Erich (4) – 1 [#64: Greed]
Weir (4) [#526: Picnic at Hanging Rock]
Welles (8) – 4 [#1: Citizen Kane]
Wenders (4) [#247: Wings of Desire]
Wilder (8) – 4 [#22: Some Like it Hot]
Wong Kar-Wai (5) [#328: Chungking Express]
Wyler (5) – 1 [#122: The Best Years of Our Lives]

- Those with 2+ in the top 200 that didn't make the list above -
Leone (3)– 3 [#73: Once Upon a Time in the West] - only 3 but all in top 200
Malick (2)– 2 [#164: Days of Heaven]

Those with 3: Paul Thomas Anderson, Theo Angelopoulos, Luis García Berlanga, John Boorman, James Cameron, Marcel Carné, Chen Kaige, David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Brian De Palma, Clint Eastwood, Jim Jarmusch, Humphrey Jennings, Jerry Lewis, Joseph Losey, Terrence Malick, Louis Malle, Albert & David Maysles, Nikita Mikhalkov, Arthur Penn, Otto Preminger, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Carol Reed, Rob Reiner, Glauber Rocha, George Stevens, Jean-Marie Straub, Jacques Tati, Andrzej Wajda, Raoul Walsh, Robert Wise, Zhang Yimou, Fred Zinnemann

The Critics 1000 list can be seen and downloaded at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Surprises
John Cassavetes with 7, has more films in the top 1000 than Kazan (6), Lean (6). Coppola (5), Wyler (5), Dreyer (5), Wong Kar-Wai (5), Preston Sturges (5), Polanski (5), Pasolini (5), Herzog (5), Minnelli (5), Jacques Tourneur (4). He doesn’t have that many great films does he, aren’t most about average at best?

William Wyler, with 13 best director and 12 best picture nominations only has 5 in the top 1000, and his greatest (Best Years of Our Lives) is only #122. This should be an all-time top 10 film, perhaps the finest anti-war film ever made.

Billy Wilder, with such original classics as Sunset Boulevard (photo right), Stalag 17, Double Indemnity, and The Apartment, has his light gender-bending comedy Some Like It Hot at #22 just outplace Boulevard (#29) as his highest ranked film; for me it’s about 4th of his.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner at #46. Not bad SciFi but ahead of E.T., Close Encounters, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, even another and better Philip K. Dick story in Minority Report? It has about 5 minutes of actual futuristic footage, then reverts into a typical detective action film: let’s hunt down and kill the androids/killers one at a time. Well done but hardly a top 50 all-time.

Woody Allen’s admittedly good Manhattan (photo left) outranking best picture winner Annie Hall, and the more complex and rewarding Hannah and Her Sisters. Together, a formidable trilogy, but the seamless weaving together of multiple family stories in Hannah directly inspired Ron Howard’s Parenthood, and a host of copycats.

Where are Coppola’s Tucker: A Man and His Dream and Peggie Sue Got Married? To include Godfather III over these takes an offer someone couldn’t refuse, or perhaps listing the Godfathers together as a trilogy.

Elia Kazan’s top film, On the Waterfront, is only 104th, when imitator Sergio Leone has one higher (73rd, the overblown Once Upon a Time in the West)? ..what are people looking at?

Surrealist Luis Bunuel has 15 in the top 1000, but 7 (and most) in the top 200? He admits to not shooting with a script, and just letting the cameras capture the film that he creates later with editing. Gee, how could you ever tell, as many of his films seem entertaining but pointless overall, especially Un Chien Andelou, perhaps ranked due to Dali’s participation? (it must be art if the guy who once set a stuffed giraffe on fire in a museum was involved.)


My Favorite Ten:
1-Kubrick, 2-Coppola, 3-Wilder, 4-Wyler, 5-Spielberg, 6-Scorsese, 7-Yimou, 8-Lean, 9-Kazan, 10-Bertolucci, John Huston(tie)
Just out: Coen Bros., John Ford, Woody Allen, Herzog, Lang, Antonioni, Tornatore, Wong Kar-Wai, Carol Reed, Weir, Welles, Wertmuller
Stanley Kubrick for sheer number of top 20 caliber films, same as Coppola, who had more mistakes having done more films. Wilder and Wyler are perhaps the most consistant. Doing just 10 is tough. For me, Welles didn't do enough great films, just a couple, Kane and Ambersons. Same with Ford - Informer and Mister Roberts are my faves. [*Subject to change at a moment's notice]