Directing a movie is hard. You are the head of massive production, and every decision about what winds up on screen has to be made by you. There is always the chance of something going terribly wrong, like unexpected weather problems, actors not wanting to participate, props failing, and drama behind the scenes causing an uncomfortable working environment that could result in you getting fired. Even if you have a great script, if you’re not in control of everything and absolutely focused on what needs to get down and how to best execute those decisions, there’s a very good chance you’ll turn out a real clunker of a movie. No one is infallible, so not every decision they make is going to work – everyone falters sometimes. Therefore, the fact that any director is capable of making multiple good movies is pretty impressive.
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Finding a filmmaker who has consistently turned in quality over the course of their career with no bad movies is just about impossible. Of course, whether something is good or bad is a matter of taste, but there are dozens of movies out there that the masses at least come close to unanimously agreeing are great. The names below don’t have perfect track records, and they’re capable of turning in movies that don’t measure up to their best work, but for the most part, they have managed to produce a body of work that has consisted of pretty good to great movies across the board. Also, this is not an exhaustive list of every single director, just some notable examples worth discussing.
Stanley Kubrick
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Few filmmakers are as synonymous with high-quality filmmaking as Stanley Kubrick. Beginning his career in 1951, Kubrick constantly pushed the medium of film forward, innovating as much as possible. He wasn’t content to simply shoot actors talking to each other in front of a wall, he wanted every last detail to assist in telling the story. From meticulously designed sets to expertly utilized camera movements, he was rigorous in his mission to create experiences the audience won’t soon forget. Think about the isolation and paranoia achieved in The Shining (a film that did not get great reviews upon release), the vastness and wonder of space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the disorienting harshness of A Clockwork Orange. His filmography is loaded with classics in nearly every genre and even a movie like Spartacus that were meddled with still turned out better than most.
James Cameron
20th Century Studios
No one is saying James Cameron is the most original storyteller in the world (he basically admitted to stealing from Harlan Ellison when creating The Terminator), but he knows how to make a movie that invests the audience, immerses them, and leaves them with an experience worth talking about for ages. He burst onto the scene with his sci-fi thriller about an unstoppable killing machine sent back in time from the future to kill the mother of the man who would one day lead the human revolution against their machine overlords and followed it up with Aliens, an action-packed sequel to Ridley Scott’s brilliant Alien. Not to mention that both Terminator 2: Judgment Day and his spy spoof True Lies are often cited as the best action movies of all time. On top of that, he’s responsible for two of the highest-grossing films in history Titanic and Avatar. While the box office isn’t always reflective of a film’s quality, both films are considered revolutionary for their scope, technological achievement, and engrossing stories.
Sarah Polley
Mongrel Media
Starting her career as a child actor in television shows like Ramona and Avonlea, Sarah Polley eventually transitioned to working behind the camera as a writer and director during the first ten years of the 20th Century with some short films, a miniseries episode, and her first feature titled Away from Her. She followed up the critic and audience-appreciated film with a divisive romantic comedy starring Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen about a couple who break up when one of them decides they need something more exciting in their life. With its frank discussions and depictions of love and sex, Take This Waltz is a brutally honest story about our expectations of romance vs what really matters in a relationship. In 2012, she directed the experimental documentary Stories We Tell and ten years later she helmed the adaptation of the Miriam Toews novel Women Talking. She may not have the longest directing resume, but she has proven herself as a bold voice unafraid to tackle difficult topics with honesty time and time again.
Jordan Peele
Universal Pictures
Just because he’s only directed three movies doesn’t mean Jordan Peele can’t be included on a list of directors who have never made a bad movie. The reason for this is that the quality of the three movies he has directed is so high that it’s staggering to imagine he’s only made three. It’s not like he made a couple of so-so movies building his way to a masterpiece, his directorial debut (Get Out) was a commercial and critical juggernaut that is still being discussed and dissected to this day. While Us may not have had the same cultural appeal, it is a deeply layered film with incredible tension and images that lodge themselves in the back of your brain. The same is true for Nope, a film that doesn’t have the same kinetic immediacy of his previous films, but that hints at unmined depths to be examined for years to come.
Steven Spielberg
When you’re a titan of the entertainment industry like Steven Spielberg, it’s inevitable that you’ll eventually turn out movies that fail to hit the mark the same way your best work does. That being said, no one is the titan of the entertainment industry that Spielberg is. Jaws, E.T., and Jurassic Park are more than just popular movies most people agree are great, they are paragons of what can be achieved when you allow a master storyteller the proper canvas to lay out his tale. There is no way that every movie he directs is going to be as good as them. Even if his entire filmography was only a third as good that would still be a stunning average. Maybe 1941, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Ready Player One weren’t the greatest films ever made, but they all had something to offer (even Hook looked incredible), making it difficult to say they’re flat-out bad. Even his subpar outings like The Adventures of Tintin, The BFG, War of the Worlds, and War Horse are never boring and contain moments of pure cinema.
Hayao Miyazaki
Toho
Like Spielberg, Hayao Miyazaki’s best work is so good that nothing could ever compare. With incredible works of art like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle, you can forgive smaller, less effective works like Ponyo (which is wonderful in its own way) because he manages to transport the audience so completely to these marvelous worlds he’s created. Despite the spectacle that comes with watching a young girl fly on a broom in Kiki’s Delivery Service or the fear and wonder elicited by the cat bus in My Neighbor Totoro, what really makes his films work so well is his ability to capture various moods and emotions and weave them seamlessly throughout the story, meaning even his lesser films still manage to move you.
Quentin Tarantino
Miramax Films
Say what you will about the content of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, they’re never boring, and they are undoubtedly his own. After such a fun and unique take on the heist genre with Reservoir Dogs, it’s incredible that he was able to make a film that was somehow structurally different, bigger, and wilder, but that feels like it exists in the same universe as Pulp Fiction. Taking the rest of his filmography as a whole, you almost can’t believe that the same guy authored (for lack of a better term) such a wide array of films that all work together as a mosaic of violence, profanity, and passion. That is what makes his oeuvre so special. It isn’t the excessive gore or long diatribes about mundane details that make his work unique, it’s the commitment he puts into them resulting in a series of movies that may vary in quality, but are never terrible.
