Unscientific and purely subjective
Now Playing: The Film Journal's Directors Poll
Over at The Film Journal they recently conducted a poll that asked the participants to submit their 25 favorite filmmakers. I was able to participate, and was happy to see that a number of my favorite were popular among the other participants as well. I had hoped to make time to print my list here with commentary, but I haven't been able to as yet, so here it is, with comments (maybe) to come.

All lists are in alphabetical order.

My top 25:
Robert Altman
Ingmar Bergman
Robert Bresson
Luis Bunuel
John Cassavetes
Jean Cocteau
Jacques Demy
Jean-Luc Godard
Alfred Hitchcock
Buster Keaton
Krzystzof Kieslowski
Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
Sergio Leone
Richard Linklater
David Lynch
F.W. Murnau
Michael Powell
Jean Renoir
Jacques Rivette
Martin Scorsese
Andrei Tarkovsky
Jacques Tati
Jean Vigo
Orson Welles

Just missed the cut

Classical filmmakers:
Charlie Chaplin
Stanley Donen
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Federico Fellini
Howard Hawks
Chuck Jones
Fritz Lang
David Lean
Sam Peckinpah
Maurice Pialat
Preston Sturges
Francois Truffaut
Billy Wilder

Contemporary filmmakers:
Woody Allen
Claude Chabrol
David Cronenberg
Brian DePalma
Terry Gilliam
Jim Jarmusch
Aki Kaurismaki
Spike Lee
Mike Leigh
Terrence Malick
Mayao Miyazaki
George Miller
Errol Morris
Nick Park
Roman Polanski
Eric Rohmer
Steven Soderbergh
Lars Von Trier
Agnes Varda

Inconsistent, but intermittently awesome:
John Carpenter
Joel Coen
Francis Coppola
Joe Dante
Clint Eastwood
Philip Kaufman
Sidney Lumet
Mike Nichols
George A. Romero
Wim Wenders
Robert Zemeckis

Missing In Action:
Michael Cimino
Elaine May
Nicholas Roeg

Need to see more before I cement my opinion :
Chantal Akerman
Robert Aldrich
Pedro Almodovar
Roy Andersson
Theo Angelopoulos
Michelangelo Antonioni
Dorothy Arzner
Bernardo Bertolucci
Budd Boetticher
Stan Brakhage
Charles Burnett
Marcel Carn?
Henri-Georges Clouzot
George Cukor
Terence Davies
Jules Dassin
Vittorio De Sica
Alexander Dovzhenko
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Sergei Eisenstein
Victor Erice
Jean Eustache
Louis Feuillade
John Ford
John Frankenheimer
Sam Fuller
D.W. Griffith
Werner Herzog
Hou Hsiao-hsien
King Hu
Shohei Imamura
Joris Ivens
Ken Jacobs
Elia Kazan
Abbas Kiarostami
Richard Lester
Jerry Lewis
Ernst Lubitsch
The Lumi?re brothers
Ida Lupino
Alexander Mackendrick
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Louis Malle
Chris Marker
The Maysles brothers
Georges M?li?s
Jiri Menzel
Russ Meyer
Vincente Minnelli
Kenji Mizoguchi
Max Ophuls
Nagisa Oshima
Yasujiro Ozu
Sergei Paradjanov
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Otto Preminger
V.I. Pudovkin
Nicholas Ray
Satyajit Ray
Carol Reed
Alain Resnais
Roberto Rossellini
Martin Ritt
Ken Russell
Michael Snow
Aleksandr Sokurov
Jean-Marie Straub and Dani?le Huillet
Josef Von Sternberg
Erich Von Stroheim
Seijun Suzuki
Bela Tarr
Hiroishi Teshigahara
Jacques Tourneur
Edgar G. Ulmer
Paul Verhoeven
Dziga Vertov
Luchino Visconti
Raoul Walsh
Peter Watkins
James Whale
Frederick Wiseman

Possible contenders in a decade or so:
Paul Thomas Anderson
Wes Anderson
Olivier Assayas
Brad Bird
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Claire Denis
Arnaud Desplechin
Atom Egoyan
Jonathan Glazer
David Gordon Green
Michael Haneke
Todd Haynes
Hirokazu Kore-eda
Hong Sang-soo
Peter Jackson
Guy Maddin
Takashi Miike
David O. Russell
Quentin Tarantino
Tsai Ming-liang
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Wong Kar-wai