Henry O'Brien
Lists. They feel simultaneously essential and meaningless to cinephilia. Whether they are rankings of the best movies of 2025 so far or a list of 15 comics to read before you watch the new Superman, movie fans have a habit of bunching stuff together in order to display our opinions on particular films, or to keep us updated on what we haven’t seen or read. I certainly can relate to both of these claims, as I have rankings of movie years I’ve seen a certain number of and lists of those same movie years with all the films I haven’t watched from that respective year.
But a routine among the swaths of film nerds on platforms such as Twitter and Letterboxd is to rank the films made by a certain director. It happens all of the time, especially when one of these said directors has a new film coming out. With Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another hitting theaters everywhere this Friday, his filmography is getting the list treatment once more. Once Christopher Nolan releases his next film in 2026, The Odyssey, folks online will go about debating whether or not Insomnia is some underrated masterpiece or how ridiculous it is to put The Prestige over Oppenheimer or vice versa. It’ll all be the same debates we’ve had before.
The question of what directors get this kind of treatment, however, becomes quite tricky to parse or understand. The filmmakers whose filmography rankings spur social media debates can really depend on what corner of Film Twitter you are in. But the few directors who can cause contentious and polemical discussions online, or quite simply, generate the most attention, may come down to larger discussions on who belongs in the modern film canon.
As I will further elaborate on, movie lists can mean absolutely nothing or be a way of flattening discussions on films, or they can be a way to uplift and reveal works of art that most viewers otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Look no further than writer Sam Bodrojan’s movie recommendations, a Substack piece that seeks to cut against the sameness of many cinephiles’ recommendation lists. As Bodrojan explains: “I have spent 15 years reading movie rec lists and so many of them are bad! They always follow the same rhythm: A domestic drama from the 80s, a queer-coded genre movie, some random indie from the mid-2010s, a canonical Western, Barry Lyndon, Crash, Possession, The Watermelon Woman, Eternal Sunshine, A New Leaf…you get it. The films are usually good; But if you’re looking for curated suggestions from another person, it’s disappointing to find a list that’s just the Roku algorithm.”
Lav Diaz, the director behind Norte, the End of History and the 2025 epic Magellan, put the whole exercise in even simpler terms in an interview with Cinema Scope: “the most abused exercise in cinema.” He continues, “It just feeds the ego of the ones who do it, and, of course, of the ones mentioned. They will actually kill or die for it. It boggles the mind.”
If you spend enough time seeing people having petty debates about a certain director’s film on Twitter, you can probably see how Diaz has a point. The arguments become less and less about the filmmakers themselves, and petty attacks fly left and right.
At the end of the day, all movie lists are an expression of something and vitally depend on intention, and many of the lists Bodrojan refers to reveal an obvious blandness and conformity in the practice of recommending films. At least for me, my habitual list-making serves as a more therapeutic use than an actual practical one. My rankings are my own, and they don’t have much larger significance than that; Kiyoshi Kurosawa isn’t getting some golden trophy because Henry O’Brien, staff writer at Film Obsessive, put his classic horror film Pulse at the top of his 2005 rankings (shameless Letterboxd plug, I know).
But the repeated tweets, TikToks and articles that dedicate themselves to showing folks’ rankings on Paul Thomas Anderson or other well-regarded and popular auteur figures such as Christopher Nolan, David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino, point to a clear perpetuation of a canon that focuses on white men with grand visions and pick their projects carefully as to build up hype for their next work. While Denis Villeneuve should garner inclusion as well, these four directors all have no more than 13 movies to their names and all generate plenty of constructive and (very) non-constructive debate and criticism throughout most, if not all, of the 21st century.
Whether they have big box office success like Tarantino or Nolan, or have enough auteur cache like Anderson and Fincher, they all generate ridiculous amounts of lists as people seemingly try to prove they know these wildly popular directors and what their best movies are. Much of the listing process never does enough to generate interesting discussions on the filmmakers, and anytime there’s some disagreement, online cinephiles become as vicious and stan-ish as any other obnoxious fanbase.
There’s a practicality to ranking these four filmmaking figures for no other reason than that they all have not too many films. One Battle After Another, for example, is Anderson’s 10th feature film in his career, so it doesn’t have to be as much of a commitment to create a ranking for him because there are just not as many movies. The same is true for Tarantino (10), Nolan (13) and Fincher (12). It becomes much more of a timesuck if you want to go about ranking all of Steven Spielberg’s or Clint Eastwood’s movies, because the two of them have made a combined 74 features. On the other end of the spectrum, younger auteurs such as Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, Damien Chazelle and Robert Eggers all have made no more than five films, leaving less room for list variety.
But the four filmmakers I’m interested in, and the accompanying lists, have spawned engagement and bad faith debates that have a common thread: these are white, middle-aged male filmmakers that started out in the 1990s and by the end of the 2000s were major directors with certain styles and interests (this being the primary reason I keep Villeneuve off since he was off to a later start).
The constant bickering and list placement can lead to no real proactive discussions on a larger canon. Even as Diaz has a reasonable allergy to making cinema just a list-making exercise, he does acknowledge that the canon does have import: “Yes, the canon, like it or not, is a necessary evil. Canon-making built so many sects and churches of cinema.” The obsession with showing how we feel about Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, and the specific order we feel them, perpetuates the worst aspects of the canon and leads to quite poor taste.
Bodrojan’s personal definition of taste is helpful in this regard. Good taste, as Bodrojan describes it, is “not about what specifically a person likes or dislikes, or how eloquently they argue for their perspective[…]It’s about expanding and deepening your pool of references. It’s about not basing your sense of self in your criticism[…]It is a fundamentally open, curious, and unsolved communal process.”
I truly believe this is a lesson many of those who continually post lists on Letterboxd should take to heart. And with that, I’ll try to see if I can positively contribute to discourse.
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To end this essay on movie lists, I’ll make a silly little movie list of my own. I’m going to give you, the wonderful readers that you are, three directors who deserve far more debates and canonized engagement. They are filmmakers whose work started in the 1990s or 2000s and have no more than 20 films. These definitely aren’t some niche picks, and some of the films these directors have made would be in the 21st-century film canon, but I do find that these filmmakers deserve further discussions and debates than they get in larger cultural circles. These filmmakers have had big financial or awards hits, but no one would mistake them for larger and popular canonical directors.
#1 James Gray: Gray, who is just a child of Sundance as Tarantino or Anderson (look no further than his appearance in the 1995 Michael Almereyda documentary At Sundance), is undeniably an auteur, but his style has far more understatement than many of his cohorts. But ranking Gray’s films would be interesting, considering he’s such a shape-shifter; many of his movies take place in his native New York City, but he’s jumped into the adventure and sci-fi genres with masterworks like The Lost City of Z or Ad Astra. His most revealing and self-critical film, Armageddon Time, also merits a hearty debate on where that actually stands in relation to his other films.
#2 Bong Joon-ho: OK, this one might be cheating. Bong is a Best Director Oscar winner, has a widely regarded canon classic in Parasite, and has gotten the carte blanche treatment from Warner Bros. with Mickey 17. But there’s still his earlier work, like Barking Dogs Never Bite, The Host and Mother, that deserve larger discussions in relation to Bong’s masterpieces.
#3 Claire Denis: Denis has a rich catalogue to work from, and, like Gray, will occasionally experiment with different genres. Look no further than her wonderful space opera High Life or her 2013 thriller Bastards. The French auteur also has recurring interests, like colonial-minded Europeans in Africa, as exemplified by Beau Travail, White Material and her newest film, The Fence.
