The Greatest Directors of All Time
Fifty directors ranked by the combined canon weight of their films: every credit in our library is scored across 20+ authoritative lists, awards and polls, then summed into one body-of-work number — with each director's top films cited.
William Wyler leads with a combined score of 33.88 across 21 films in our library.
- 1William Wyler21 films in the library33.88
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) · Friendly Persuasion (1956) · Ben-Hur (1959)
- 2Martin Scorsese22 films in the library31.54
Taxi Driver (1976) · Raging Bull (1980) · Goodfellas (1990)
- 3
- 4Steven Spielberg17 films in the library31.23
Schindler's List (1993) · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) · Jaws (1975)
- 5Francis Ford Coppola8 films in the library29.07
The Godfather (1972) · Apocalypse Now (1979) · The Godfather Part II (1974)
- 6Clint Eastwood23 films in the library28.18
Unforgiven (1992) · Million Dollar Baby (2004) · Mystic River (2003)
- 7
- 8David Lean14 films in the library25.54
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) · The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) · Brief Encounter (1945)
- 9
- 10Stanley Kubrick10 films in the library23.78
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) · Dr. Strangelove (1964) · Barry Lyndon (1975)
- 11Ingmar Bergman20 films in the library23.41
Wild Strawberries (1957) · Persona (1966) · The Seventh Seal (1957)
- 12John Ford17 films in the library22.55
How Green Was My Valley (1941) · The Grapes of Wrath (1940) · Stagecoach (1939)
- 13Billy Wilder10 films in the library20.82
The Apartment (1960) · Sunset Boulevard (1950) · The Lost Weekend (1945)
- 14
- 15Yasujirō Ozu23 films in the library19.10
Tokyo Story (1953) · Late Spring (1949) · Early Summer (1951)
- 16George Cukor15 films in the library18.56
Gone with the Wind (1939) · My Fair Lady (1964) · The Philadelphia Story (1940)
- 17Joel Coen10 films in the library17.28
No Country for Old Men (2007) · Barton Fink (1991) · Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
- 18
- 19Ethan Coen9 films in the library17.12
No Country for Old Men (2007) · Barton Fink (1991) · Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
- 20Frank Capra10 films in the library16.99
It Happened One Night (1934) · You Can't Take It With You (1938) · It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
- 21Michelangelo Antonioni9 films in the library16.91
Blowup (1966) · La Notte (1961) · Red Desert (1964)
- 22Miloš Forman8 films in the library16.88
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) · Amadeus (1984) · The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
- 23Shohei Imamura15 films in the library16.54
The Eel (1997) · The Ballad of Narayama (1983) · Black Rain (1989)
- 24
- 25
- 26Elia Kazan10 films in the library16.10
On the Waterfront (1954) · Gentleman's Agreement (1947) · A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
- 27Fred Zinnemann10 films in the library15.98
A Man for All Seasons (1966) · Julia (1977) · From Here to Eternity (1953)
- 28Charlie Chaplin11 films in the library15.97
City Lights (1931) · Modern Times (1936) · The Great Dictator (1940)
- 29Ang Lee9 films in the library15.92
Brokeback Mountain (2005) · Sense and Sensibility (1995) · Lust, Caution (2007)
- 30Luis Buñuel16 films in the library15.23
Viridiana (1961) · Belle de Jour (1967) · The Exterminating Angel (1962)
- 31Paul Thomas Anderson9 films in the library15.18
One Battle After Another (2025) · Licorice Pizza (2021) · Magnolia (1999)
- 32Sidney Lumet12 films in the library14.72
12 Angry Men (1957) · Network (1976) · Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
- 33Woody Allen14 films in the library14.24
Annie Hall (1977) · The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) · Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
- 34Michael Curtiz11 films in the library14.12
Casablanca (1942) · Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) · Mildred Pierce (1945)
- 35David Lynch9 films in the library13.62
Mulholland Drive (2001) · Wild at Heart (1990) · Blue Velvet (1986)
- 36Louis Malle14 films in the library13.51
The Silent World (1956) · Atlantic City (1980) · Au revoir les enfants (1987)
- 37Luchino Visconti12 films in the library13.36
The Leopard (1963) · Sandra (1965) · Conversation Piece (1974)
- 38Andrei Tarkovsky7 films in the library13.35
The Sacrifice (1986) · Solaris (1972) · Ivan's Childhood (1962)
- 39Abbas Kiarostami10 films in the library13.33
Taste of Cherry (1997) · Close-Up (1990) · Where is the Friend's Home? (1987)
- 40Tadashi Imai19 films in the library13.08
Bushido, Samurai Saga (1963) · Until We Meet Again (1950) · An Inlet of Muddy Water (1953)
- 41Kenji Mizoguchi17 films in the library12.97
Ugetsu (1953) · Sansho the Bailiff (1954) · Sisters of the Gion (1936)
- 42Wim Wenders12 films in the library12.90
Paris, Texas (1984) · Wings of Desire (1987) · The State of Things (1982)
- 43Bong Joon-ho5 films in the library12.83
Parasite (2019) · Memories of Murder (2003) · The Host (2006)
- 44Satyajit Ray11 films in the library12.79
Pather Panchali (1955) · Aparajito (1956) · Distant Thunder (1973)
- 45Quentin Tarantino9 films in the library12.70
Pulp Fiction (1994) · Inglourious Basterds (2009) · Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
- 46Ernst Lubitsch18 films in the library12.42
The Love Parade (1929) · Ninotchka (1939) · Trouble in Paradise (1932)
- 47Éric Rohmer20 films in the library12.25
The Green Ray (1986) · The Marquise of O (1976) · The Aviator's Wife (1981)
- 48Leo McCarey10 films in the library12.13
Going My Way (1944) · The Awful Truth (1937) · Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
- 49Carol Reed9 films in the library11.85
The Third Man (1949) · Oliver! (1968) · Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
- 50Robert Bresson9 films in the library11.75
A Man Escaped (1956) · Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) · L'Argent (1983)
A director's score is the sum of their films' composite scores in our library — a body-of-work measure, not a single-film peak. Methodology.
What a body-of-work score rewards
Ranking directors by summing their films' composite scores is a deliberate choice with consequences worth stating plainly. It rewards sustained canonical output over a single perfect film: a director with eight films the canon keeps citing outranks one immortal masterpiece and a quiet career. That is why William Wyler — twenty-one library films, three Best Picture winners, decades of awards-season centrality — can sit above directors with louder modern reputations, and why the list is a genuinely different object from a "favorite auteurs" poll. It measures the depth of the shelf, not the height of the peak.
Reading the surprises
The instructive entries are the ones that feel wrong. Studio-era craftsmen rank high because the awards apparatus of their time was thorough and the registries have had ninety years to canonize them. Directors who worked in fits — a Dreyer, a Vigo — rank lower than their reputation among critics, because a body-of-work sum structurally punishes small filmographies. And living directors climb in real time: every new festival prize or poll appearance adds points to a career total that historical figures can only gain through rediscovery. None of this is a bug to apologize for; it is what "measured by the whole record" actually looks like, and the per-director film citations let you check every step of the arithmetic.
Where to go from here
Four directors on this list have full ranked filmographies on this site — Kubrick, Hitchcock, Scorsese, Nolan — and more are coming as the library deepens. For everyone else, the three films cited beside each name are their highest-scoring works and the fastest way in. If you want the version of this question the critics answer directly, the Sight & Sound directors' poll (one of our tier-3 sources) asks four hundred filmmakers to name the greatest films ever made — comparing its verdicts with this page's arithmetic is a short education in how canons are built.