Who is the worst 21st-century Hollywood auteur?

Here is a dull and destined-to-fail explanation of my criteria:

—The base criterion is the very squishy idea of "household name" — or at least the movies they make have to be relatively appealing to non-cinéastes, can be seen at the multiplex, etc. I looked at Letterboxd's top 500, some random listicles, and the Oscar noms. I don't really like including Other as an option on polls, but it's there if you must. Horror is a bit of a blindspot for me, so I may have overlooked some big names there, sorry.

—Worst: I decided to make this after watching Wake Up Dead Man last night and reminding myself of Rian Johnson's rather odd imho filmography (not that I hated the movie, it's just an odd path to auteur status). Plus I figure if I left someone obvious out it's less painful if the choice is worst not best.

—21st-century: for the most part I excluded anyone who got to this level or near enough in the 20th century. Which meant no PTA, Fincher, Cameron, Coens, Tarantino, Scorsese, Malick, etc. There are some edge cases. I admit Jackson is a pretty big stretch given how early he started, but I think it's fair to say he wasn't really in this category until LOTR.

—Hollywood / mainstream: I excluded most foreign directors (e.g., Bong Joon Ho) unless they've more or less transplanted to Hollywood. Lanthimos was probably the hardest one to decide; my gut feeling is he's a little too weird for this list, but it seemed wrong not to include him given how high-profile he has become. Despite the much discussed death of middlebrow films, there were a few people who I couldn't confidently gauge their level of mainstream-ness but kept in, e.g., Zhao, Eggers, McDonagh; but others I left out for being too arthouse, e.g., Baker, Glazer, Guadagnino, Reichardt — I doubt this distinction will hold up under rigorous scrutiny tbh.

—Auteur: let's not argue about this term. I'm using it as shorthand for big name directors, i.e., people whose name itself can attract attention. I mostly excluded people known primarily for IP regurgitation (JJ Abrams, James Gunn), though there are some borderline cases like Snyder and Coogler. I made some arbitrary calls about career stage too, like leaving out the Safdies and Emerald Fennell. I am not sure Edgar Wright really qualifies, but he was mentioned on a few things I looked at.

I've liked or tolerated at least one film by every person on this list. I think you've left out the worst and I question your choice to omit Reichardt and Guadagnino, especially Guadagnino would be shocked to learn in 2026 that he's art house.

yeah Guadgnino should probably be on there, I just got tired of fussing with the list (I went back and forth on Wes Anderson too many times), but it's true that I did see Challengers at the multiplex. Less convinced that Reichardt belongs though, she strikes me as pretty quintessentially arthouse...but I've yet to see a single film of hers!

curious which "worst" you had in mind Alfred

Fincher, Soderbergh, Nolan, and Aronofsky are the worst offenders / biggest turds imo. But Nolan does it bigger, more pompously, more outrageously bad, so he can take the crown.

Only other director hear I'd look askance at is Eggers but even then I think he's mostly harmless if a tad pretentious. Everyone is else is fine in my book, even if they're not for me.

I probably should have said in the OP that I by no means dislike all these directors; the list was meant to be somewhat objective in accounting for the category, not just who I think sucks

and in fact I haven't even seen anything by Aster or Zhao, so there's literally no judgment implied there

rather odd imho filmography (not that I hated the movie, it's just an odd path to auteur status

Auteur: let's not argue about this term.

uhhhh

sorry, we can certainly argue about the category I'm trying to limn, but I don't care about capital-a auteur theory's relation to it is what I meant

I admire Soderbergh's pace even if the speed at which he works results in glib little projects (The Christophers). I can't dislike the director who made High Flying Bird, Black Bag, and Presence in the last decade.

But he's not on the list so.

I probably should have said in the OP that I by no means dislike all these directors; the list was meant to be somewhat objective in accounting for the category, not just who I think sucks

― rob, Tuesday, May 5, 2026 7:23 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I definitely didn't think that. If anything, my post reflects my ongoing attempt to be less critical/negative, when possible, but this is a topic that really brings it out of me lol

admit Jackson is a pretty big stretch given how early he started, but I think it's fair to say he wasn't really in this category until LOTR.

—Hollywood / mainstream: I excluded most foreign directors unless they've more or less transplanted to Hollywood

let's not argue about this term

if you just wanted a thread about Peter Jackson sucking you probably could have found one tbh

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

Of the auteurs I've seen 2 or more films by:

Darren Aronofsky - mostly pretty bad but Pi was OK
Alfonso Cuarón - Children of Mean easily his best, Black Swan shite
Guillermo Del Toro - overrated but generally falls into the "quite good" category
Robert Eggers - started well and declined ever since
Peter Jackson - Heavenly Creatures easily his best
Yorgos Lanthimos - veers between great (Dogtooth) and mediocre (Kinds of Kindness), probably peaked now
Martin McDonagh - OK-ish
Christopher Nolan - pompous tripe, Oppenheimer maybe the worst film I've ever endured to the closing credits. WINNER!
Jordan Peele - peaked with his debut
Zach Snyder - only seen Watchmen (OK-ish) and Man of Steel (unendurable)
Denis Villeneuve - tedious and shallow other than Arrival
Edgar Wright - dullard but no worse than that

it’s sam mendes, close thread, kthxbye

Alfonso Cuarón - Children of Mean easily his best, Black Swan shite

Black Swan was Aronofsky

we haven't even reached peak Mendes yet, we're two years away from that

xp American Beauty would have disqualified him per my highly irritating and slippery criteria, but that is a good call

Del Toro might be my least favorite based on his last output since Pan's Labyrinth.

Is Nicolas Winding Refn still too art house to be included? Not that I'd vote for him as worst, but just wondering if he'd qualify for the poll.

hmm yeah I think he would qualify actually, an oversight on my part

Every Ari Aster movie is some prestige exploitation bullshit, so him.

Also feel like Antoine Fuqua could be on this list, though nowhere near my least favorite. Could imagine one of the qualifications being anytime a movie trailer says, "A film by ___"

His last what 4 films have been Danish co-productions and he’s never really worked with a big Hollywood studio so in my head he is more arthouse adjacent

xp re Refn

My brain says Snyder, but my heart says Nolan (even though I have liked a few of his movies). I think it's because the perception of Nolan is that he is making important prestige (see what I did there?) films.

Aronofsky for me, when he is ineffective he's completely vapid, when he's effective (and he can be) he leaves me feeling like I have PTSD, either way I am very much not enjoying the experience. Also his AI generated series about the American revolution was an absolute abomination.

I wouldn’t say Zhao is the worst on that list but for “middlebrow oscar winner about Shakespeare” Hamnet was much worse than Shakespeare in Love

Black Swan was Aronofsky

Yeah sorry I got mixed up, I meant Gravity was shite

'Gravity' was okay but disappointing.. more of an industrial accident than a science fiction film

so Paul Thomas Anderson is not of this century?

Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider, Nomadland, even Hamnet are assured, distinctive films (haven't watched her paycheck film).

Gravity: for me it was more like a tech demo for 3D cinema that didn't totally suck ass, but I barely even remember it as a film narrative

Andy: PTA having Boogie Nights and Magnolia in the 90s excluded him. harsh and possibly dumb, but the list would have been crazy long and idk this wasn't meant to be all that thought out lol

I like Kelly Reichardt, glad she's not on this list

respectfully submitting alejandro gonzález iñárritu for consideration here

yep he should have been on there for sure

there's your answer

would vote for aronofsky but i am 99% certain that the craftspeople he works with are more responsible for his style than any decisions he makes on his own

Everyone on the list has at least one movie I like, except Damien Chazelle, so him.

snyder is pretty bad, i still cringe when i think about the slow-mo mega punches delivered by the "heroes" in watchmen

scarfspeople

xp dammit

absolute rogues' gallery isn't it

if not for 'The Wrestler', Aronofsky would be a shoo-in

Nicolas Winding Refn was the first name that popped into my head before opening the thread.

Nicholas Fucking Refn

This is tough. Yorgos Lanthimos has pretty much taken up the mantle of Michael Haneke of celebrated contemporary auteur that I cannot stand, but as with Haneke, I am willing to concede that much of that may be just a mismatch between my tastes and his aesthetic. Zach Snyder, on the other hand, makes objectively repulsive garbage that somehow attracts defenders.

So, Snyder.

I don't really think of Peter Jackson or Zach Snyder as auteurs. They just do large scale franchise stuff for the most part. Now 90s Peter Jackson, that was something else.

yeah but snyder subsumes all of that franchise stuff into his own style (not a good thing)

hence, auteur!

You're not a true auteur until you do a film about growing up in Brooklyn

You're not a true auteur until you do a film about growing up in Brooklyn

you're not a true auteur until you do a film about growing up in Brooklyn the owls of ga'hoole

I don't think of Jackson as an auteur either but I'm voting for him for showing early promise and then turning his life over to hobbits and beatles.

For me, Wes Anderson, but of the ones up there, Rian Johnson (despised the two Knives Out films I saw) and Darren Aranovsky (seen two or three--exhausting). I thought for sure I'd hate Yorgos Lanthimos, but three films in, not at all.

It's got to be Snyder, right? He filmed an entire action movie with consumer-grade bokeh lenses.

also bad:
Peter Jackson: now seems to just put his name on AI-enhanced footage
Christopher Nolan: most overrated by film bros. he did make memento, though.
Edgar Wright: he puts so much filmmaking effort into so very stupid movies. wasted potential.

I mean, Bryan Singer should be on the list even if he likely won't make another movie.

I can't vote because I've avoided the ones who probably aren't my bag (Eggers, del Toro, etc.).

Nah, Bryan Singer is way 90s.

Great poll idea. Hard to pick one.

Darren Aronofsky - "Requiem" is very-near the top of my worst-ever movies list, and "Pi" sucked too, but there is something compelling about his abject failure movies (The Fountain, Mother) that makes me kind of root for him, in a weird way. I like Black Swan fine.

Alfonso Cuarón - I haven't seen "Tambien" since it cHaNgEd mY LiFe when it came out, but the subsequent ones are totally fine and good, thumbs up from me

Guillermo Del Toro - I'd rather watch an empty screen than watch any more of his TV series but his movies are often good. Pan's Labyrinth was pretty fuckin overrated

Robert Eggers - The Witch was good, subsequently he's just boring, no opinion really

Peter Jackson - Absolute garbage horseshit. LOTR 1 was fine, Heavenly Creatures was fine, I could be persuaded to watch The Frighteners again, everything since then is terrible terrible, not even an auteur, some hideous Monstro Elisasue of Spielberg and Michael Bay

Yorgos Lanthimos - I like him fine. Poor Things good. Bugonia good. Sacred Deer good. What's not to like I guess.

Martin McDonagh - I've only seen Banshees, and this dude improbably cured my Colin Farrell allergy, so he gets immunity from me.

Christopher Nolan - He's totally good when he's given a small canvas, I legitimately adore Insomnia, enjoyed The Prestige, was fairly impressed/thrilled by Dunkirk. The Batman movies are some of the worst movies I've ever seen, and Oppenheimer is dumb and gay.

Jordan Peele - he's OK, I think he needs a new editor, his films are poorly paced.

Zach Snyder - I've never seen any of his films. He did 300? I barely remember it.

Denis Villeneuve - Like Nolan, I like the weird stuff-- Polytechnique, Incendies, Sicario. Dune was unenjoyable. Arrival was a good adaptation but I'll just read the short story again thank you.

Edgar Wright - I have the rare ILX-unfriendly opinion that Scott Pilgrim movie is actually really good.

My vote for worst: PETER JACKSON

i feel like snyder is a hack in a way that none of these other people are, but that's not a reason to vote for him

Oh, I missed some.

Ryan Coogler - Sinners whatever but Wakanda forever

Ari Aster - Eddington, right? I love it. I haven't seen that famous short film and I won't but it does make me like him less

Greta Gerwig - leave her alone, her films are great

Rian Johnson - the only reason why Rian could possibly be considered for this list is because Brick actually kinda totally sucks, but everything he's done since then is fantastic; this guy made Poker Face ffs, get him off this list

Damien Chazelle - I don't care, he's made like two movies and they're fine.

Chloe Zhao - I haven't seen any of her films.

i'm not a film person but nolan seems objectively bad at filmmaking, just on a technical level his films seem really sloppy and difficult to watch/follow.

I'm voting Nolan, having seen three of his films, even though I'm sure I'd dislike some of the filmmakers I haven't seen more (Snyder for instance). I find Nolan pushy in a mechanical way, and each of the films has a irritating conceit that makes no sense (like the tattoos in Memento or the cannon fodder dream warriors in Inception).
I've seen five films apiece by Aronofsky and Lanthimos, but still don't know if I actively like them? They seem to resist being liked?
Favourite film I've seen by any of these filmmakers might be Maelstrom or, more recently, Get Out.

i voted for Damien Chazelle but he may be in "you get half a bar - fuck yall" territory. Anyway shd have Alex Garland on there bc I do not believe that man to be trustworthy. Aster is in the same boat and I'm not liking that multiple films I've seen recently have a special thanks credit to him.

write in for Russo Bros

$7B gross (3rd all-time, they just passed PJackson & MBay), will eclipse both Cameron & Spielberg by the end of the decade.

Manufacturers of the most immediately forgettable slop in the history of mankind.

otm

Had to look up who they are. Only thing I've seen that they had anything to with is some episodes of Arrested Development, and I'll likely keep it that way.

you wouldn’t call them auteurs would you? isn’t that kind of the opposite of slop peddlers, at least in theory?

what i just learned is their 2025 film The Electric State had a budget of 320 million

Garland is probably a good call, didn't even cross my mind

Russos did but yeah they're just hacks, no?

lol it looks soooo stupid

xp

https://i.ibb.co/tw9jLNks/image.png

what i just learned is their 2025 film The Electric State had a budget of 320 million

― omar little, Friday, May 8, 2026 2:48 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is literally the first I've heard of this movie. Did they not give it an advertising budget?

I, too, have never heard of this film, nothing whatsoever

stuff like this makes me feel like large chunks of hollywood are just legalized money laundering opps

ops

The 2026 film Desert Warrior is being described by media outlets as a historic box office flop, losing over 99% of its investment after grossing less than $1 million worldwide against a reported $150 million budget.

not sure who to vote here tbh - maybe nolan but seems too easy - but would def smash those radio and submit buttons HARD if "daniels" were...

also not mad about leaving out reichardt since she's clearly the best mainstream adjacent auteur this country's still got (imo)

write in for Russo Bros

this too

Okay, they did direct some good Community episodes.

But also Captain America: Civil War was one of the worst cinema experiences of my life.

Nolan for me. I'm your classic "I only liked the early stuff" with him, but his films have been such pompous bores for a long time and The Odyssey looks like more of the same at full tilt.

Suspect Nolan will win this, but voted Villeneuve

I'm sure Snyder's terrible but have maybe only seen 300, which was sort of hilarious. Not a Nolan fan but have moderately enjoyed a couple. I'm voting Aronofsky because he seems among the most full of himself — he really thinks he's a visionary genius, or that's what his movies indicate anyway — and because of the films I've seen by people on the list, there's no I hated more than Requiem for a Dream. So much that I've refused to watch anything since, tbh, but from what I've read of them I don't think I'm missing anything.

The rest:

Aster — only seen Hereditary (eh) and Midsommar (liked it). The subsequent two look very annoying and I've avoided them
Chazelle — seems dumb, not interested
Coogler - I like all his movies
Cuaron - haven't seen anything by him in a while, but I really like a couple earlier ones
Del Toro - sometimes fun
Eggers - The VVitch is pretty great. Subsequent movies are OK.
Gerwig - She's good.
Jackson - Eh. His best stuff was in the '90s, his LOTR movies are probably as good as you can do with that.
Johnson - Mostly pretty entertaining. He's like a '70s TV guy making movies, they'd be good network Movies of the Week.
Lanthimos - Not always good, sometimes annoying, but singular and sometimes great.
McDonagh - His Irish slap shtick feels kind of worn at this point, but it's not a bad shtick.
Peele - I've liked all three of his movies so far, not all great but interesting ideas.
Villeneuve - I have no big beef with him. I'm not super excited for another Dune movie, but I'll go see it on a big screen, sure.
Wright - He's OK. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are funny.
Zhao - Jury's out, I've only seen Nomadland and didn't like it but I'm not prepared to write her off.

tipsy I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts on Eddington. It’s long but def not a slog— I thought it was extremely underrated

I guess I need to watch it. I've heard conflicting things about it, but enough good things from thoughtful people that I should give it a shot.

It’s not as charming whizz-bang a Western as One Battle, but it is nice and cool to see Aster bringing his misanthropic detachment to a more conventional picture. Joaquin and Pedro and Dierdre are all A+, too

voted Chazelle but Billboards Outside Missouri was the most annoying of any of these movies that I've seen

I’m not a huge horror guy but I enjoyed Aster’s first two, then absolutely loved Eddington. V underrated imo. I really enjoyed Beau as well, even though it was prob too long and a bit too indulgent. My gf liked that one best. Listened to a couple of long-ish interviews with him last year and I feel like this guy Gets It.

only person on this list that hasn’t made at least one film i like is snyder, so it’s gotta be him

agree with this

as established i love to hate so many of these so-called auteurs but i think the most challenging opinion i might have in this domain, based on posts i've seen elsewhere, is that i think 1917 is kind of awesome. believe me when i say it pains me to admit this

I loathe Sam Mendes and often wish it’d been him instead of Minghella (who I really liked)— what a horrible thought, I’m going to give 1917 a shot

Surprised Snyder is considered an “auteur”. I liked his Dawn Of The Dead, but I’m likely skewed bc Sarah Polley and Toronto and a friend of mine were all conspicuously in it

Had to look up Snyder's filmography. I don't cross paths with his films at all apparently. Literally never ever. Pretty sure it's unfair to conflate "worst" with "has had no discernible impact on my life whatsoever" but it's an appealingly clean-cut approach, at least...

Maybe it's fairer to vote for Jackson. At least my "just don't care"-ness actually stings a little, as I lapped up everything up to Heavenly Creatures as a child. And I was very into Tolkien as child, but can't sit through any of those films.

Snyder is certainly an auteur in the classic sense

as distasteful as they are, you cannot mistake his films for anyone else's

goon, I wanted to love Eddington when I watched it in February, months after its release. My conclusion was that despite the sections with Phoenix dealing with COVID the film wasn't sure what it wanted to say and even if it had something to say but was confused about it I'd still admire it more than the slog I watched.

I'm prepared to watch it again tho.

I thought this was going to be an easy Nolan until I opened the thread and saw Snyder. It's really hard to vote for anyone who made anything worth watching over him.

I think Snyder’s DOTD remake is his best film but it’s not really very good. It has a stellar opening sequence, and a genuinely great Sarah Polley performance, with Ving Rhames as a nice #2, but nothing else.

And much like the case with JJ Abrams, I think handing him the keys to a franchise kingdom was an enormous tactical error.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I shall endeavour to be a more well-rounded viewer and watch a Snyder film methinks. So maybe DOTD then? 300?

I had to turn 300 off in the first few seconds.

I’ve liked everything of Ari Aster’s, even Beau Is Afraid. Yorgos Lanthimos? As much as I am repulsed by some of his films I think he is an interesting and potentially great filmmaker. Cuaron directed Children of Men and Roma, two of my all-time favorite films. Jordan Peele directed Get Out, Us, and Nope, all of which were pretty astonishing. I didn’t like Barbie but I love Greta Gerwig in general

I agree with Albert that del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth was revelatory but everything else has been diminishing returns. Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse were so amazing, but not the subsequent films.

I haven’t seen Aronofsky in a while, so I should rewatch. Chazelle is middlebrow but fine.

I’ve always hated Nolan but have to admit that I kind of liked Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. Chloe Zhao’s first two films, Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider were really great, and Nomadland and Hamnet weren’t bad

Zach Snyder is lame and he's the only option where I also don't like a single thing he's done. Beyond him, I think everyone else on that list has made at least one movie I like or love, and a few of them have made several. So I think I'd have to go for someone who has made several movies I didn't like in a row, like McDonagh, Zhao (haven't seen her pre-Nomadland stuff) or Aster. The latter of whom is the only one of that batch that really rubs me the wrong way, though.

I guess I gotta re-watch Roma.

My shortlist of most-hated movies, I've rewatched some of them to verify their worthlessness. Rewatched Crash and indeed it is the worst. I enjoyed One Battle... so much that I went back and rewatched Magnolia-- nope, still the worst fucking film. I will not, cannot, ever rewatch Requiem For A Dream, absolute garbage, I think I rage-typed an essay on how much I hated it some twenty years ago

Yeah, Requiem for a Dream is the worst I've seen. I have this twisted thing where I always hope that artists I don't like make something that leads me to change my mind...and I guess The Wrestler and Black Swan did that. (Never gave Hal Hartley a second chance after The Unbelievable Truth.)

Rewatched Crash and indeed it is the worst.

Figgis or Cronenberg? Cause I walked out of the Cronenberg movie.

Was it because you thought it didn't do the book justice?

I'd read Selby's book before seeing Requiem For A Dream, so I guess I wasn't going to be taken aback by the content of the movie, but he's one of the least "stylistically sensational" of novelists - he deals with extreme situations in a prosaic way - and the film dealt with everything in such a flashy way that didn't feel honest to the material.

Haggis. Not Cronenberg. I hated the Cronenberg when it came out, the “penis in her anus” scene weirdly made me feel more squicked out than anything else— prob bc I was a year or two shy of an actual sexual relationship at the time, and awkward sex scenes seemed terrifying to me. Watched it again recently and it’s great. Awkward sex scenes are hilarious and fun and cool, now

Was it because you thought it didn't do the book justice?

It was just bad. It wasn't erotic, but it also wasn't anti-erotic in an interesting way. Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors but that's one of his two or three worst movies.

That’s so interesting. I think I’ve expended more hours trying to not ragequit a movie as I have expended on Cronenberg’s. I mean M Butterfly, eXisteNz, Spider, The Brood, Rabid, hell even Videodrome. I love the highs tho— Fly, Ringers, the Viggo ones, Dead Zone. Generally I’m a Guy Maddin guy I guess

My phrasing is weird. What I mean is I watch all his films and find myself generally irritated

eXisteNz and Spider (and Cosmopolis) are crap. But The Brood, Videodrome, The Fly, The Dead Zone, Naked Lunch... those are movies I come back to again and again.

Ohhhh I have to watch Naked Lunch again. In my teens 20s I used to ruin dates by wanting to watch a film I’ve read about— M Butterfly was one, Prospero’s Books another, Happiness a disasterous third. Date night is perhaps not the right format for cinematic enrichment

no real clue but i've *heard* of zack snyder, which a strike against him

i'm tempted to go chloe zhao just on the over-amplified directorial resume.

zach snyder is the lazy vote.

my second thought after the unavailable Nicolas Winding Refn pick was to remember who directed "Mother!".

i haven't seen enough directors on this list to comment except that damn snyder feels like a ringer, much as i'm loving the nolan hate here. like, jackson did good stuff in the 20th century and is now hated by basically everyone, whereas snyder is the joe rogan of directors.

i do think the omissions are interesting and surprising. if you're going to put on snyder, why not shyamalan? the wachowskis?

I'd show Naked Lunch to potential friends to decide their suitability.

eXisteNz is probably in my top 20 films ever, it does help if you've played a lot of glossy 90s point-and-click adventures as it's all a riff on that and the performances are deliberately bad in a very specific way.

xp "I can think of at least two things wrong with that title" - Nelson Muntz

When friends and I go out to eat I'll point at a food item and quote Judy Davis' line as she's shooting up bug powder: "You might like to try it yourself. Or you might not."

Most of this lot have pissed me off at some point. Only one of them made Poor Things

Got to hand it Spielberg, year after year, decade after decade, the guy is always the answer to this question.

per robs criteria in the op shyamalan & wachowskis are out cause their breakthrough films were in the 90s (& like decisively so, not an edge case like Jackson)

Got to hand it Spielberg, year after year, decade after decade, the guy is always the answer to this question.

― Ward Fowler, Monday, May 11, 2026 7:57 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Relieved that year after year people still post this bullshit.

lol

"eXisteNz" is great, one of the very few movies I've seen where bad accents play an important role.

Man, thinking about it, Jackson is a tough one. The three "Lord of the Rings" movies are great, but I've disliked everything he's done since and I dread everything his name is attached to for his Lucas-like revisionism, embrace of the uncanny valley and technological meddling. Though I love his early work. No one talks about "Heavenly Creatures" anymore, I wonder why not?

"existenz" is one of my fav movies as well

I liked Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole when it came out. I should watch it again. Point for Snyder. Other than that, I've only seen his Dawn of the Dead remake, which I recall liking as well, but I didn't have much of a baseline knowledge of zombie movies at the time.

I had always said that, although I didn't like Nolan, I enjoyed his Batmans. But I rewatched them recently and there's a lot less to like than I thought. Some technically impressive stuff and some cool stylistic flourishes, but overall a slog.

i love snyder but we’ve been through this. rewatched sucker punch a few months ago and it’s astonishing anyone gave him money to do that but i’m glad they did

martin mcdonagh sucks the most of anyone on this list and it’s not remotely close lmao

zhao and chazelle have wasted the most of my time tho

I'm surprised, ivy! I thought The Rider would be a film you'd like.

i’m very pro-lanthimos, the hate for him feels like overwrought projection every time

I'm not as fond of The Banshees of Inisherin as most, but Colin Farrell, Barry Keoghan, and Kerry Condon want to keep making moves like it I wouldn't mind.

i haven’t seen the rider so maybe i’ll forgive zhao upon watching it. she obviously has talent

i just don’t really think of mcdonagh as a striking filmmaker, and his scripts are uhhhhh not for me, for the most part

I'm still stewing over Ward's dismissal of Spielberg -- in 2026. Besides the fact that he's made some of his most morally/tonally complex films since 2001, by this point his style and choice of material look like Dreyer's compared with, I dunno, Chazelle, Snyder, et. al.

re: the cronenberg discussion up thread, he’s our greatest living filmmaker i m o, no one probing as deeply conceptually or visually

clicked on this thread thinking of aronofsky and none of the other names on the list changed my mind, they all seem fine

xpost

Heh, after yr previous response I actually went and looked at Spielberg's Wiki just to remind myself of the filmography, and this run in particular seemed to me as disastrous a list of credits for any 'major' American film-maker as you can get:

2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
2011 The Adventures of Tintin
War Horse
2012 Lincoln
2015 Bridge of Spies
2016 The BFG
2017 The Post
2018 Ready Player One
2021 West Side Story

I don't really know why 'in 2026' but I get the sense, here and elsewhere, that Spielberg is something of a 'national treasure' for American cineastes and to point out the many many limitations to his work is to curdle the sacred cow's milk. Again, here and elsewhere, I get the sense that for many left European cineastes he's come to represent everything that's obnoxious about American cultural imperialism and exceptionialism.

"the performances are deliberately bad in a very specific way."

There's a moment where the acting suddenly "normalizes" that blew my mind.

Here is a dull and destined-to-fail explanation of my criteria:

My first go to explanation would have been "of this is just a best of 21st century auteurs list from some magazine, turned upside down"

xxp well yeah a lot of filmographies would look bad if you removed the good films

Names I'm a little surprised aren't on here:
Richard Kelly
Neill Blomkamp
Taika Waititi

And although he's mostly a TV guy, and involved in existing IP, I'd think of Noah Hawley as being on here.

2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
2011 The Adventures of Tintin
War Horse
2012 Lincoln
2015 Bridge of Spies
2016 The BFG
2017 The Post
2018 Ready Player One
2021 West Side Story

I don't really know why 'in 2026' but I get the sense, here and elsewhere, that Spielberg is something of a 'national treasure' for American cineastes and to point out the many many limitations to his work is to curdle the sacred cow's milk. Again, here and elsewhere, I get the sense that for many left European cineastes he's come to represent everything that's obnoxious about American cultural imperialism and exceptionialism.

How are Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, and WSS disasters? I didn't like The Post or RPO but they don't strike mas disasters or examples of American imperialism. In the last 20 years Spielberg has spent hundreds of film hours interrogating American power -- and Israeli power in the case of Munich.

You didn't mention The Fabelmans, one of the more poignant portraits of a young artist in the midst of a family breakdown.

Shit, if we're looking at everything that's obnoxious about American cultural imperialism and exceptionialism from the point of view of left European cineastes, then say goodbye to Hawks, Capra, Walsh, Ford, Coppola, and Scorsese.

Alex Garland is another one I'm surprised is not on here.

I'd add S. Craig Zahler too, the very definition of an American auteur (writes his movies, consistent viewpoint, not making franchise sequels or superhero movies).

Kelly’s directing career is p much dead since his 3rd feature almost 2 decades ago, would be kind of mean to include him

snyder is disqualified for making the only good 21c superhero movie (BvS)

only zhao movie i’ve seen is hamnet but it was almost powerful enough to get her over the finish line here

went with chazelle tho. who does this loser think he is

I've by no means seen films by all of these ppl (and looking at what they've done I've little interest) but 300 was possibly the worst.

There's a moment where the acting suddenly "normalizes" that blew my mind.

I've seen multiple films by Lanthimos and liked or semi-liked some of them, but I voted for him because he made a film that will basically cause an action replay of our Olivia Rodrigo thread clusterfuck if we get into it, which nobody wants. Obviously the Chazelles or Eggerses or Nolans or whatever of this world will never make a good film, and The Dark Knight Rises is possibly the worst film I've ever seen, but I wasn't abjectly, morally disgusted by their work

*worst film on a pacing/narrative/aesthetic level

Richard Kelly
Neill Blomkamp
Taika Waititi

Some of the suggestions have made me realize there was an unspoken and somewhat unconscious recency bias / desire to capture a more current zeitgeist going on when I thought up this list. So the fact that Kelly hasn't released anything since 2009 is why he didn't occur to me (this was also part of the Winding-Refn issue), and frankly looking at his 3 films I'm not convinced he belongs here anyway — part of the criteria here is the capacity to succeed in Hollywood/mainstream cinema to at least some extent.

Blomkamp: maybe this is some kind of bias or something, but he seems too minor to me.

Waititi: this one I did consider. I probably should have erred on the side of inclusion, but he didn't quite fit when I was making the list. I certainly wouldn't have voted for him here, but his mainstream, post-Wilderpeople movie career is hugely disappointing and I feel like he belongs to some other slightly different category.

And although he's mostly a TV guy, and involved in existing IP, I'd think of Noah Hawley as being on here.

I regret a lot about this poll, but I don't regret not including TV people; the list would have been unmanageable then. OTOH I think Hawley is wildly overrated and I might have voted for him lol

Alex Garland is another one I'm surprised is not on here.

yeah as mentioned upthread this was straight up an oversight

I'd add S. Craig Zahler too, the very definition of an American auteur

I brought this on myself by stupidly using the magickal word Auteur, but I think you're misunderstanding the category to an extent, which isn't your fault tbc. This name rang no bells, but I recognize the titles of his films. Nonetheless they seem to be complete commercial failures with nearly no mainstream appeal.

Dragged Across Concrete is a 2018 crime thriller film, written and directed by S. Craig Zahler. It stars an ensemble cast that includes Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn....

her star has certainly waned in recent years but Sofia Coppola seems like an omission

So many of these - Cuaron, Del Toro, Lanthimos - are ppl I've seen one film by, thought it sucked, and just never caught up with again. Life's good this side of the discourse - sure I might be missing out on something I'd enjoy but there's plenty of that in the world and this way I don't end up wishing any of these people ill.

Another side effect of disconnecting myself like that is at this point I almost think of Nolan as an underdog, so many people I know hate the guy; I know many more like him but I never hear from them.

I say he'll never make a good film. I enjoyed Batman Begins when I saw it at the time. No idea if it's good or not but

The Beguiled is the only uninteresting S. Coppola film.

Ari Aster is a funny wrinkle to the 'saw one, hated it' - I saw Midsommar, LOVED it, and am completely reluctant to see anything else he's done cos I just know it'll ruin it

None of his Batman movies are good, no. Batman 66 still best Batman film.

Every director needs to make a Batman movie so that we can have a standard for comparison.

you know I had assumed The Virgin Suicides was 90s and didn't bother checking until now. It was technically 1999 (Cannes) but the US debut was in 2000, so yeah she should be here, alas.

fwiw if someone had the urge, I think a much better version of this would be a ballot poll for BEST 21st c. director — forget Hollywood, forget auteur. You'd have to decide if anyone who released a film in the 21st c. is eligible or not — and run the risk of classic 20th c. directors skewing the point — but it would probably be a lot more generative an exercise.

Aside from slick/innocuous hacks like Gareth Edwards or Colin Trevorrow, James Mangold is another overlooked candidate. I like several of his films, but in a thread where people love Zach Snyder and hate Spielberg, who knows! There's also Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, if they haven't been mentioned yet.

clemenza thinking Wes Anderson is worse than any of the above is probably the single worst opinion I have ever seen on ILX

The Beguiled is the only uninteresting S. Coppola film.

I more or less agree. She stumbled in adapting a novel that had already been done well in the 70s--twice, if you also consider her film as sort of a sideways take on Picnic at Hanging Rock, a clear influence--and by dropping the original's most interesting character. Otherwise, I tend to consistently enjoy her films, even the decidedly "minor" ones like On the Rocks.

(xpost) As much as I loathe Anderson this century, that's not exactly what I said--I just happen to have seen all his films, as opposed to a few directors on the list where I doubt I've seen any. So for me personally, he's the worst.

But I am proud that, for you, I made ILX history.

alright, that's reasonable. I rescind

although I now find it astonishingly baffling that you keep returning to him despite hating his last 12 films or whatever lol

I guess it's like how I listen to every Cigarettes After Sex album, as a little treat to my own capacity for hatred

And I shouldn't say "this century," which in the first few years includes a couple of Anderson films I like--it's everything from the hotel film forward.

I keep returning because that's how much I love Rushmore. I can name a half-dozen directors I habitually return to because of films they made 30 and 40 years ago who constantly disappoint me.

james mangold started in the 90s with hackers and girl, interrupted. he strikes me more of a ridley scott-type, who will direct a good script into a good movie but will not elevate things on his own

xps

i quite like the Beguiled, which I didn't see on release and then ran across last year. I never read the novel nor did I see the original so my opinion is based on the film alone without comparisons

snyder is disqualified for making the only good 21c superhero movie (BvS)

this is certainly an opinion

is it the worst you've ever seen on ILX though

ridley is def a much better director than mangold, but that's the comparison i reach for

I’ll correct you there in that Iain Softley directed Hackers, which I maybe only remembered because someone on instagram posted the opening credits with Orbital’s “Halcyon”. Mangold did Heavy and Copland and GI as his first three. He just strikes me as an anonymous craftsman with no discernible signature, though I don’t think it means he’s bad or anything, he seems to do a pretty decent job.

Waititi earns a fair amount of goodwill from me for making Thor Ragnarok which is surely the most “fun” Marvel movie and maybe the only one I would want to see again.

This name (Zahler) rang no bells, but I recognize the titles of his films. Nonetheless they seem to be complete commercial failures with nearly no mainstream appeal.

I guess Reichardt isn't an auteur by this definition, either. (I'd say they both very much are, and requiring that someone with their own distinct internal rulebook be immediately recognized and deliver financially successful work is quite a limitation.) I guess my shorthand for auteur is "you definitively know whose movie you're watching within the first 10 minutes."

yes, sorry, i was confusing heavy and hackers. probably also confused because hackers and girl, interrupted both have young angelina jolie

Had the same reaction at the time, then actually did rewatch it and would not recommend, the goofs don't make up for it being yet another episode in a tedious overarching story where you have to put all the little figurines in place.

snyder is disqualified for making the only good 21c superhero movie

I don't think he did actually do Shin Kamen Rider but I'll double check.

oh xposts my post was to the Ragnarok love

I guess Reichardt isn't an auteur by this definition, either. (I'd say they both very much are, and requiring that someone with their own distinct internal rulebook be immediately recognized and deliver financially successful work is quite a limitation.) I guess my shorthand for auteur is "you definitively know whose movie you're watching within the first 10 minutes."

― Strait of Merzbow (Eazy), Monday, May 11, 2026 12:29 PM (six minutes ago)

She isn't according to the operant definition, which is why she isn't on the poll and why I've had to repeatedly explain that I'm not using auteur in that way. Again I'm not blaming anyone, I shouldn't have used the word. Reichardt is surely an auteur and I'm happy to take anyone's word that Zahler is too, but the point was to consider directors who *simultaneously* have some kind of auteurist rep and are also big mainstream filmmakers

At one point David Gordon Green would have fit the bill. Maybe he still does?

A lot of Nolan's work draws me in as the premise is set up, but then I feel like I'm back in a college humanities class where there's a dude who talks over everyone and is pushing the prof to adjudicate his interpretations. I end up irritated by the Kubrick precision yet with a total lack of Kubrick ambiguity. Unlike some of the others here, I've never ended up liking anything I've seen.

(Sorry, rob, I realized the same thing immediately after hitting send. Would’ve deleted if that were an option.)

xp I tried to form an opinion on DGG but failed, possibly because I haven't seen anything he did between Pineapple Express and uh Nutcrackers. With that in mind, my sense is that's he's been pretty fully absorbed into the Danny McBride machine?

Eazy: no need to apologize! In fact, I'm sorry for being defensive. I am not cut out for making threads like this I have learned.

clemenza thinking Wes Anderson is worse than any of the above is probably the single worst opinion I have ever seen on ILX

― imago, Monday, May 11, 2026 9:03 AM (fifty-six minutes ago)

it's not even the worst on this thread! (i'm with alfred - saying spielberg is a bad filmmaker is EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEME CHALLOPS)

Eazy: no need to apologize! In fact, I'm sorry for being defensive. I am not cut out for making threads like this I have learned.

― rob, Monday, May 11, 2026 10:06 AM (three minutes ago)

ahhh, i think it's a good thread, something low-stakes that people can have extremely strong opinions about (like i'm not actually _upset_ that ward thinks spielberg is a terrible director)

aw thanks Kate, I appreciate that!

I think the problem is that I am skeptical of categorization, so having set myself up to have to defend and explain my own act of categorizing makes me feel like I'm thread policing & being peevish. I'm also not a big hater when it comes to culture really, or at least not at the individual artist level like this. But I do think the thread has been interesting, if not super surprising, in showing some negative tendencies of 21st c. cinema, and there have been many great posts. I particularly enjoy reading the well-viewed people who can offer takes on most of the list.

I'm pretty neutral on Spielberg myself (he's got good, great, mediocre, and awful films), but I would be curious to actually read an articulation of what Ward said about him & Americanism. It seems like a stretch to me, but I'm not a European in any meaningful way

I would definitely be interested in a cultural study of how Spielberg became 'America's director' (John Ford probably held the role before him? Or maybe Disney?) But I'm genuinely surprised that bashing him is considered 'extreme challops' - Jacques Rivette was calling him an asshole in 1997!

well, yeah, because the criticism of Spielberg as a mass entertainer or something is old and by this point received.

John Ford HUSTON I think you mean

Duel is better than most of the films the guys in the poll made

and lol Disney wasn't a director

he's got good, great, mediocre, and awful films

The whole package!

Spielberg and Scorsese (he's also got good, great, mediocre, and ... hmm, maybe no awful Marty films) are probably the two most successful (and self-appointed) prominent living stewards of Movies, writ large. Both virtuosos, both prolific, both diverse and often distinctly American in their outputs and interests.

I don't mind Nolan at all, and don't really get the hate, except from people who rightfully bristle when he's considered some grand cinema genius or whatever. He's mostly middlebrow and doesn't have much to say about anything, no much more than the equally adept and innocuous Villeneuve, but I think he's a good enough filmmaker.

yeah it's the inflated rep that might end up winning this for Nolan. It wouldn't occur to me to vote for Snyder, for ex, because the man is a joke

I would definitely be interested in a cultural study of how Spielberg became 'America's director' (John Ford probably held the role before him? Or maybe Disney?) But I'm genuinely surprised that bashing him is considered 'extreme challops' - Jacques Rivette was calling him an asshole in 1997!

― Ward Fowler, Monday, May 11, 2026 11:13 AM (twenty-three minutes ago)

hmmm

to a certain extent i feel like spielberg represents the horatio alger story. all-american eagle scout kid from cincinnati who broke into hollywood on the strength of his sheer talent, making a fucking _tv movie_ so good that it was not only released to cinemas, but is often today still considered a "film". part of an outsider new wave of cinematic rebels who became the ultimate insider while retaining his principles and humanity. in the face of tremendous adversity created the blockbuster film out of whole cloth. high-profile failures, as far back as 1941, didn't keep him from coming back with a vengeance. has proved himself a master of the craft, while conspicuously _not_ being flawless and impeccable. if there's an anecdote that defines spielberg to me, it's his working on jurassic park and schindler's list simultaneously. that's what spielberg represents to me.

you know what impresses me most about spielberg? i genuinely believe that at any time he could make a film that would be his best to date. or he could make a film that's hot garbage! and neither would change who he is as a director. that sort of duality to me, that just seems so quintessentially american.

Spielberg and Scorsese (he's also got good, great, mediocre, and ... hmm, maybe no awful Marty films) are probably the two most successful (and self-appointed) prominent living stewards of Movies, writ large. Both virtuosos, both prolific, both diverse and often distinctly American in their outputs and interests.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, May 11, 2026 11:28 AM (twenty-four minutes ago)

scorcese is fine but his films just come off as such Guy Films to me. spielberg, otoh, is i feel more of a family filmmaker at heart. i have complex feelings about the nuclear familiy but it at least casts a wider demographic net. i actually fucking loved hugo, and scorcese just hasn't been successful with films like that, afaik.

You've never watched Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or The Age of Innocence?

high-profile failures, as far back as 1941

oh you fucking know what i mean

You've never watched Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or The Age of Innocence?

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 11, 2026 11:58 AM (twenty-one seconds ago)

admittedly not. i'm kind of out of my depth in cinema discussions! i haven't seen that many movies.

maybe no awful Marty films

Have you seen Killers Of The Flower Moon?

ROBERT DE NIRO: Now, you see, nephew, we've gotta kill all these Indians and steal their oil money. Kill the Indians, steal the oil money. You got it?

LEONARDO DICAPRIO: *makes Sling Blade face*

repeat for 3 1/2 hours

I didn't like "Killers," but I reserve the word "awful" for movies that are actually awful. Even if "Killers" were Scorsese's "Hook," I'd take it over "Hook."

Every director needs to make a Batman movie so that we can have a standard for comparison.

― jmm, Monday, May 11, 2026 9:00 AM (four hours ago)

there's warhol looking smug again

https://cdn1.dangerousminds.net/uploads/7/images/nico-and-andy-warhol-as-batman-and-robin-1967-3.jpg

it's not even the worst on this thread! (i'm with alfred - saying spielberg is a bad filmmaker is EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEME CHALLOPS)

― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, 11 May 2026 bookmarkflaglink

That's hilarious. I mean, he might not be the worst but he's utter garbage lol

I always thought 'Spielberg is shit' is a very normal opinion.

Among many left European cineastes.

...except the one who acted in Close Encounters

he only did that as a goof

and Godard would've said he wasn't a leftie.

i did like godard's seminal work, i am the same type of communist as you

I don't think he did actually do Shin Kamen Rider but I'll double check.

<3

Spielberg is by far my most-watched and re-watched American director. Dunno why anyone would hate on him beyond the obvious “skews corny” crit

It is an interesting fantasy to think about a parallel universe version of American cinema where he never existed, tho. Maybe Friedkin and Peckenpah would’ve dominated the 80s/90s tone/style/mood

yeah, he's got a pretty decent body of work

But this is about the auteurs of the 21st Century!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

auteur…of the 21st Century! (echo)

Eggers escaped!

okay, anyone who voted for 'other'... please list

I can't believe Nolan beat out Snyder though I don't know that Snyder is an auteur.

Ryan Coogler may have garnered zero votes but Sinners remains one of the most godawful pieces of crap I've ever endured, although it's not as bad as Oppenheimer so there's that

"Spielberg is by far my most-watched and re-watched American director. Dunno why anyone would hate on him beyond the obvious “skews corny” crit"

That's an issue, especially with something like Schindler's List, but it's just not been my kind of film for the last 20 years though I'll watch a blockbuster now and then. Don't think I've watched any of his since AI.

and Godard would've said he wasn't a leftie.

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 11 May 2026 21:42 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i did like godard's seminal work, i am the same type of communist as you

― the manda-whore-ian and hoe-gu (voodoo chili), Monday, 11 May 2026 21:44 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Honest question, is there actually anything to indicate Truffaut was a lefty? Not in his films imo, and trawling through his wikipedia in French the only political activism seems to be support for Henri Langois when the govt fired him and a defense of free speech/artistic freedom, all of which I think just confirms his cinephilia rather than locating him anywhere on the political spectrum. Worth remembering plenty of ppl in the Cahiers orbit tended right - Melville, Rohmer, I think Chabrol as well despite his hatred of the middle classes.

Left Bank people like Resnais, Varda, Marker were much more left. Like Godard, you could also see it in their films.

Not that it's necessary. I like Rivette a lot but you wouldn't say he wears his politics in all his films.

And I'm not just being anti-yank. Lots of American experimental film and B-movies noirs are some of my faves. I'll re watch those ones!

My personal take on Spielberg is he's better at the Jurassic Parks than the Schindler's Lists, basically. Great action movie director, expert at tension, underrated sadistic streak. But that's not his self-image, and as soon as he goes into Thoughtful Humanist mode it's all over.

Very reasonable take.

My challops would be that the Nolan Batman Trilogy >>>> Indiana Jones Trilogy

And I like the two Indy Jones films (not the racist one).

Daniel v. much OTM about Spielberg, Jurassic Park definitely the last film of his I enjoyed unreservedly.

I like Rivette a lot but you wouldn't say he wears his politics in all his films.

Reading Emilie Bickerton's excellent A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma, I was definitely surprised to learn that Rivette was possibly the most left of all the Cahiers crowd and that it was Truffaut who supported Straub early on.

This famous letter from Truffaut to Godard sees Francois laying in to Tout Va Bien on political grounds!

https://filmcinemamovie.proboards.com/thread/32/truffauts-letter-godard?ref=quillette.com

Shit, if we're looking at everything that's obnoxious about American cultural imperialism and exceptionialism from the point of view of left European cineastes, then say goodbye to Hawks, Capra, Walsh, Ford, Coppola, and Scorsese.

Except that European cineastes have always had a fondness for unapologetic American rightists like Hawks who don't sully their vision with 'thoughtful humanism' and other useless liberal handwringing.

That's the thing with Spielberg: you get masterful editing to leaven the Thoughtful Humanism; and in Empire of the Sun, Lincoln, A.I., War of the Worlds, Munich, and Lincoln the Thoughtful Humanism works on its own, especially if you like the Ford of Young Mr. Lincoln and the Calvary Trilogy.

But that's not his self-image

Quite disagree. In America, especially the last decade, he's the guy who made Jaws, Indiana Jones films, and Jurassic Park.

Alex Garland is another one I'm surprised is not on here.

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

I'd add S. Craig Zahler too, the very definition of an American auteur (writes his movies, consistent viewpoint, not making franchise sequels or superhero movies).

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

Kelly’s directing career is p much dead since his 3rd feature almost 2 decades ago, would be kind of mean to include him

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

None of his Batman movies are good, no. Batman 66 still best Batman film.

best Batman film came out 2017

1992 and 1966 prob about even

Spielberg is by far my most-watched and re-watched American director. Dunno why anyone would hate on him beyond the obvious “skews corny” crit

― it was the worst feeling i’ve ever heard (flamboyant goon tie included)

the worst thing i can think to say of about him is that his patron was sid sheinberg

glad to see nolan take this. i voted nolan just because snyder just seems categorically different from the rest of these. feels kind of like the cinematic equivalent of dunking on dream theater!

James Mangold is another overlooked candidate.

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

As much as I loathe Anderson this century,

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

james mangold started in the 90s with hackers

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

I guess Reichardt isn't an auteur by this definition, either.

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

Again I'm not blaming anyone

Do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

Quite disagree. In America, especially the last decade, he's the guy who made Jaws, Indiana Jones films, and Jurassic Park.

Self-image, Alfred, not image! He does not want to be remembered as that guy though he will be.

Duel is better than most of the films the guys in the poll made

look this is obviously true but do you get beaten up on a regular basis or are you just like this on message boards?

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or The Age of Innocence?

is my watch broken?

My love of Dennis Weaver has gotten me into many a scrap

"Do you get beaten up on a regular basis" x 5--I don't flag posts and all that stuff (pretty sure I've never done it even once in 15 years here), but that really is disgusting.

Sic, what the fuck?

tbf to sic that's a quote of something someone else said to sic. I don't really understand what he's objecting to at this point, but apparently this thread was super divisive

my wording there might be confusing: I understand why he'd object to someone asking him that! I don't understand the 5x post-bombing a week later

Okay, I didn't realise that. Still dickish, but at least there's a slightly understandable motivation for the word choice. The thing is, if he has a problem with those posts in particular, it would be much more useful to EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK HIS PROBLEM IS INSTEAD OF BEING OBLIQUELY THREATENING. And if the problem is going back to being needlessly pedantic on a thread where everyone else has accepted that the terms are woolly, well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Btw I don't think I actually joined in on the discussion in this thread, but I voted for Nolan. If anyone was wondering.

"but apparently this thread was super divisive"

It's just people chatting about films. No need for that..

I don't dislike speilberg but have never once watched his films and had that Wow moment, no, not even Jaws or ET.

obliquely threatening is sic’s whole deal. I don’t think I’ve ever said a negative word to him.

for the Spielberg haters I beg you to watch Duel. it’s less than 80 minutes.

Def a case to be made that 'Murder by the Book' is Spielberg's best work.

I can't pretend seeing Jurassic Park in the theatre at age 13 wasn't a wow moment. I was also very much an Indiana Jones obsessed kid

I think the one true Spielberg surprise for me though was how fantastic his episode of Columbo is (xpost!)

Despite the casting of Ansel Elgort, I'll take his WSS over Robert Wise's.

his episode of Columbo

did a pretty kickass episode of Night Gallery as well, I believe

with Joan Crawford!

yeah, that was part of the three part pilot... I have Serling's novelization of it, with the awesome title of A Season to be Wary

The thing is, if he has a problem with those posts in particular, it would be much more useful to EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK HIS PROBLEM IS INSTEAD OF BEING OBLIQUELY THREATENING.

Catterdale wished IRL physical violence on me for reading the word “auteur” in the thread title before clicking on it, and noting that one single exception to “21st century Hollywood” had been made. I was curious as to whether that was regarded as appropriate discourse toward anyone else observing those topics.

dude i don't know what your issue is but every single post you make reads "this guy is a gaping pedantic asshole" to me. just a little anecdata fyi but then anything involving self-reflection really isn't your bag.

what if a vendetta against one poster but no one understands what the hell kind of point you are trying to make because a week has passed?

gaping pedantic asshole

here I merely predicted that asking ppl not to differ from a new definition of a word itt was unlikely to be observed, and rob's mounting desperation over the week might be seen as having borne this out

mounting desperation? jesus ok. you are talking to people, not words. your prerogative but it means that when you get a little unhinged with some serial quote posting and your point is buried somewhere in the beautiful maze of your intellect people aren't predisposed to take kindly to it.

goddamn let people have a dumb thread.

xp (if Boring thinks that this means rob should be physically assaulted instead of me, I look fwd to finding out whether that would be disgusting or literally unremarkable)

speaking as someone who usually can't click with Spielberg (basically everything released in my lifetime bar two and a half Indiana Joneses), his West Side Story astoundingly played like the director of that Murder By The Book -> Duel -> Sugarland Express -> Jaws run. the blocking and tracking feels like a guy is behind the camera going "oh shit I can't believe this worked so well and it's still going!" except he's 75 not 25.

and The Fabelmans is his first auteurist film.

you are talking to people, not words. ... aren't predisposed to take kindly to it.

again, just observing that you believe it's appropriate to talk to me like that, and you expect me to take kindly to it.

Well, according to another mod sic got enough FPs here to warrant a week's ban, but I wanted to reply to him anyway: Catterdale's "do you get beaten up" etc was also not cool, but posting it repeatedly is significantly more noticeable than posting it once!

I was curious as to whether that was regarded as appropriate discourse toward anyone else observing those topics.

No, you weren't. Because if you were, then you would have said that in words, instead of conducting a private experiment that to everybody else looks like intentionally fucking up a thread.

here I merely predicted that asking ppl not to differ from a new definition of a word itt was unlikely to be observed

No, you didn't. Because if you were doing that, then you would have said that in words, instead of pasting two sentences and typing "uhhhhhh".

21st-century Hollywood auteur sic-zoid ban

I've been irritated by his pedantry for years. He's like a hall monitor denying people bathroom passes.

well my post was just meant to point out in a colorful way that if you barged into somebody's convo irl with that kind of aggressive pedantry it would rightly be considered confrontational and inappropriate and might lead to problems -- so why is it ok on a message board? wasn't an endorsement of violence, if anything it was a sincere inquiry

Are we settling on “catterdale” then

(I quite like it lol)

yes

haha

wow lol

Catterdale sounds like some kinda faux-artisanal cheese brand

Also I'm not sure auteur is quite as platonic a concept as some of youse think but let's not fight over that one eh?

Edgar Wright 1

shit, i should’ve voted for this tool. first couple of films are great but he’s out of ideas and keeps making movies. baby driver and last night in soho are terrible

i did to try to vote for Wright but I think i might've already voted for Nolan by then

when I was first introduced to auteur theory in the first term at film school it was presented as a played-out debate which you shouldn't take too seriously, this was 1998.

God I was shocked when I saw Baby Driver, couldn’t believe it was an overwhelming critical success

Also I'm not sure auteur is quite as platonic a concept as some of youse think but let's not fight over that one eh?

― Wildfowler (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, May 12, 2026 3:39 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yesss…had my popcorn at the ready for the inevitable poptimism crossover discussion

Auteur vs. brand name is maybe a debate, but any time anyone is promoting or talking about something as "a Darren Aronofsky film" or whatever, then I think that's auteurish enough. Which I think is true of everyone on this list, even Zach Snyder.

Cahiers didn't build auteur theory around art movie directors

God I was shocked when I saw Baby Driver, couldn’t believe it was an overwhelming critical success

All movie critics secretly love the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

taylor swift is an auteur imo

My fave Spielberg (and fave Dick adaptation) is Minority Report. Genuine love for Catch Me If You Can, too— top drawer Williams score. I can’t really think of him as “an auteur” perhaps because his entire language feels so enormously influential, completely shifted the angle of American cinema away from the dour nihilism of New Wave toward something more feel-good and commercial. I genuinely believe that Spielberg didn’t just redefine American cinema but also American cultural identity. And I admire that, I guess, even if I don’t know how to feel about The Implication Of It All.

The American auteur that doesn’t click for me is Linklater, beyond Slacker and Dazed. I haven’t gotten more than 30 minutes into any Before.. movie before feeling like I was wasting my life and switching it off.

Surprised that I was the lone vote for Jackson. I watched every version of every Middle Earth film of his out of Tolkien-fan obligation, and the best thing I can say is that I didn’t hate The Hobbit movies as much as everyone seemed to hate them (but I sure as hell won’t watch them again).

The American auteur that doesn’t click for me is Linklater, beyond Slacker and Dazed. I haven’t gotten more than 30 minutes into any Before.. movie before feeling like I was wasting my life and switching it off.

Really? That’s harsh

I just scanned Linklater’s filmography and I did love Hit Man

I thought I voted for Jackson!

I love a lot of Linklater, I think of him kind of like Soderbergh but in a different vein: lots of movies, good range of genres and ideas, definite identifiable tics and tropes, recurrent themes. Some great ones, some clunkers, pretty good batting average.

He can be massively entertaining — Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, Everybody Wants Some are all great fun. And his "artist" movies (Orson Welles, Nouvelle Vague, Blue Moon) are endearing. I like the way he writes, he's good at conversation.

Really? That’s harsh

I just scanned Linklater’s filmography and I did love Hit Man

― it was the worst feeling i’ve ever heard (flamboyant goon tie included), Tuesday, May 12, 2026 5:47 PM (one hour ago)

I'm just kidding! I love linklater, the "before" trilogy especially, but one thing I just thought about is his sensibility is extremely hetero. not a problem for me but I could see how that sort of thing wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea

like even blue moon, which I love and which is (unless I'm forgetting one) the only one of his features with a queer lead, the lead is played by ethan hawke, and the love interest is a woman 25 years his junior

really not sure how I would have voted in this poll btw since I don’t really make a point to go see movies I am pretty sure I’m not going to like. snyder, aster, chazelle all seem like they probably make middlebrow fluff but I couldn’t tell you for sure. I might have gone with villenueve if this were a few months ago, because I really don’t like his epics and I think his influence on the industry is a bad thing, but I saw sicario for the first time recently and that ruled. nolan has made plenty of middling movies too but I really do like his batman movies and some of the early stuff

they're weirdly similar directors, imo

xp I don't think it's a straight/queer thing. I will try and be precise about why I don't vibe with Linklater. I noticed it first with Waking Life, where I felt as if I was in second year university listening to my friends in the semiotics department, having drunk far too many cups of tea, talk at me. It felt like I was being talked at. I felt the same when I was attempting to enjoy Before..., as if I was expected to enjoy sitting across the room listening to a couple muse on philosophical topics. There is a quality to Linklater's writing that comes off to me as being very one-sided, not like somebody is being a storyteller, but is extemporising on some deep thoughts that he's been having. And I like those sorts of deep thought extemporisations-- when I'm part of the conversation, and can respond. But yeah, it seldom feels enlightening or instructive or entertaining to me, it feels like... well, it feels like reading a message board conversation, not being able to participate, and being told "this is cinema".

i def don’t think linklater scans as necessarily hetero. i’m a lesbian who loves the before series

i mean i guess that wouldn't keep him from being straight. but like. blue moon is sooooo gay regardless of hawke as the leading man. would put money on ethan hawke having made out with a dude in his life

I'm a queero who loves the first couple Before films, and he's been aware of how Ethan Hawke's son in Boyhood comes across, not to mention however you wanna accept Blue Moon.

The characters may be ostensibly straight but Everybody Wants Some!! is pretty damn gay

Yeah EWS is suuuuper gay (complimentary)

you can hang out with all the boys

The only time I've ever believed in Glenn Powell too.

I've not seen the movie, but is Jack Black's character gay in "Bernie"?

As closeted iirc. It's never said explicitly, but pretty clearly Linklater and Black conceive of him as gay.

after this thorough investigation i've determined that linklater has more of a bisexual sensibility than a straight one

i mean here's the thing, before sunrise is about a man and a woman falling in love as their conversation progresses, but i don't think of the connection depicted as hetero at all (except when they are in painfully antiquated ways discussing the Differences Between Men and Women)

Bernie is very good. One of the better inside jobs on the "South is complicated" trope. I think what I like about Linklater is that he's got a Texas jock dude squareness to him, even if he's lived his life in arty spaces. So while he's fluent in auteur methods, he's got this aw-shucks basicbro practicality. Kinda like Spielberg minus the tendency towards corn.

xp Why can't heterosexuality be broad enough to include this kind of connection?

i'm speaking from my gay soapbox here but heterosexuality is narrow and repressed by nature

sorry to all the heteros here

I feel almost sorry for these squares.

Why you think the Straight Pride flag looks like this?

https://i.etsystatic.com/33245026/r/il/8952e0/3577051970/il_1080xN.3577051970_clcg.jpg

wait'll y'all hear what i think about marriage and having kids

I am sure you would blow our minds by saying marriage and kids are...just neat

Or we'd just blow you.

Damn!

My fave Spielberg (and fave Dick adaptation) is Minority Report. Genuine love for Catch Me If You Can, too— top drawer Williams score. I can’t really think of him as “an auteur” perhaps because his entire language feels so enormously influential, completely shifted the angle of American cinema away from the dour nihilism of New Wave toward something more feel-good and commercial. I genuinely believe that Spielberg didn’t just redefine American cinema but also American cultural identity. And I admire that, I guess, even if I don’t know how to feel about The Implication Of It All.

The American auteur that doesn’t click for me is Linklater, beyond Slacker and Dazed. I haven’t gotten more than 30 minutes into any Before.. movie before feeling like I was wasting my life and switching it off.

lol

i think my fave dick adaptation is linklater's "a scanner darkly"!

my take on queerness in media is that one of the results of queer erasure is that pretty much anything can be read in a queer way. i don't give a shit whether or not linklater is actually queer, if his stuff resonates with someone in a queer way, cool. dick resonates with me in a queer way. particularly stuff like "a scanner darkly" and "flow my tears" which feature "dual-moders" as protagonists - bob arctor is a cop on the down-low lol

Oh yes, I agree. Interestingly, my history of culture consumption has excluded whole sections of "queer canon" work, with no disrespect to the creators of that content-- Dennis Cooper and Gregg Araki spring to mind, their work just doesn't press the buttons that need pressing.

I skipped "A Scanner Darkly" based on my dislike of "Waking Life" but I'll watch it presently based on your recommendation!

cool, lmk what you think!

i attacked sic in this thread for bad reasons and with poor judgment - sorry sic. fwiw i value your contributions to ilx a lot.

I clicked on this just to shit on the guy who directed American Beauty (I know, 20th century but he’s still working) and Road to Perdition and he’s not even listed. Boooo.

you know what impresses me most about spielberg? i genuinely believe that at any time he could make a film that would be his best to date.

― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, May 11, 2026 11:53 AM (one month ago)

uh, steven, for the record i was talking _hypothetically_

i mean, not that i mind!

I'm not sure what you mean.

Is Kate saying that Disclosure Day is his best film?

sounds like the opposite

no it’s fine Kate, talk amongst uh yourself lol

Pretty sure it's "Not that I mind that, as I said earlier, he could make a film that would be his best to do. I just didn't expect that he would!"

*best to date

Ah, I read it as "That was just hypothetical, since you obviously didn't do it this time. Not that I mind. Nice try, anyway."

just read somewhere that Kelly Reichardt only shoots on 16mm film? no digital, no 35mm... that's pretty impressive

It could be as simple as that's how she started out and she's sticks to it in an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" way. Apparently, it gives her the results she wants.

Rewatching the Dark Knight and maaaan... There's obviously a lot to love about this film but Nolan's breathless directing style leaves me bewildered and constantly needing to rewind just to keep up. "Wait, how did this character know that?", "Wait, what are they doing on a boat all of a sudden?", "Wait, what are they talking about now?", "Wait, which character mumbled that line?", "Wait, wait , wait..."

I mean, maybe my viewing comprehension is poor but I swear some scenes needed three rewinds before I decided to just let it pass. I don't think this kind of claustrophobic film making is good though

There's a major misapprehension with Nolan where people read confusing, illegible and hard to work out, as super smart and intelligent.

Feels like Tenet was the only film where it didn't work for him - just pushed it too far to the point where the whizz bang stuff wasn't worth the wait

i dunno what works for him but the only time it worked for me was memento, the rest all fail to some extent (and a few of them fail conpletely)

And a weird thing where there's a lot of spoken exposition, except it's presented in these extremely short scenes where everyone is speaking in this fast, clipped, semi-cryptic fashion with over-lapping sentences and references to in-world locations and minor characters we're barely familiar with.

It's like he feels a need to employ the necessary evil of exposition in order to explain the plot, but also doesn't want to waste time spoon-feeding the audience or dragging the pace down. So instead he just rushes it all through and ends up making the plot MORE confusing than it would have been if he hadn't

I agree that Memento, which by nature ought to be disorienting, feels like one of the few that is easy to follow

There's a major misapprehension with Nolan where people read confusing, illegible and hard to work out, as super smart and intelligent.

It's audience self-loathing; "I don't get it, so I must be dumb — I'll keep working at it till I'm smart, like the people who tell me how brilliant it is." The same sad impulse that caused me to spend years trying and failing to hear what others heard in Lou Reed.

Nolan, he's in the end always aiming for blockbusters, so he often takes these sorts of generally heady ideas and whittles them down or into to something conforming to a style, these broken up scenes that scan as intriguingly elliptical but often add up to something just shy of sensical. It sometimes works, I like how he jumbles up space and time, not just as novelty but as a way to tell a story (like the way Intersteller iirc jumps forward months/years without making a big deal of it), but it also comes off kind of hand-wavy, presenting concepts too complicated to explain thoroughly/coherently so instead just tossing out enough snippets of big concepts so that you think/know he's smart and/or, sure, maybe think you're dumb for not entirely getting it. Which may explain why he's at his best when he goes small: Memento, The Prestige, even Dunkirk or hell, even Oppenheimer, which in the end is just a biopic. There's nothing not to get.

He goes small in Dunkirk and Oppenheimer? Huh.

I mean in terms of storytelling. Obv. they are Big Epics, but the stories and ideas themselves are pretty self-contained and straightforward, imo. And of course based on real life events.

hal, post the sketch about the elephant again

he likes to create relentless forward movement, which when combined with his penchant for nonlinear sometimes makes his movies feel like 3 hour montages (oppenheimer felt this way to me, the odyssey less so)

Yeah, that sounds about right. And then he stuffs them with ... stuff. As opposed to, say, Malick, whose movies are also often more or less montage, but often abstract and impressionable, less plot-driven. And, of course, much prettier than Nolan's movies. "Tree of Life" might be the most akin to Nolan's approach, except I find the former profound in a way I've never found Nolan profound (and I am not even a real Nolan hater). Maybe I just find more of interest in the ellipses.

mallick: do i see?

nolan DO U SEE?

ofc there's nothing useful or interesting in saying a billion dollar movie generator like nolan needs an editor more than pretty much anybody working in creative fields today and he (wrongly) wont care for my saying it but nolan needs an editor more than pretty much anybody working in creative fields today

i also worry that he might not have a soul

I think he's a pretty talented director with some obvious limitations, and a subpar writer whose screenplays would never get filmed if he weren't the one filming them. From early in his career I've thought he'd possibly make better movies by following the Fincher model of looking for scripts he liked instead of writing them.

Oh yeah surely uncontroversial to say the guys a rotten screenwriter, a couple of lines in Oppenheimer got big (scornful) laughs in my screening. Didn’t happen at the odyssey but should have with some of the inane shit the actors had to say

Of course, Fincher has made a few dogs, too, and now only barely gets his grand visions released by Netflix before they go streaming-exclusive in the worst possible form. He may be the most successful, talented filmmaker banished mostly to the small screen.

David Fincher still make movies?

He did one with Michael Fassbender a couple years ago and is currently working on that Cliff Booth Tarantino prequel/sequel.

The Killer was a nullity iirc

There's a major misapprehension with Nolan where people read confusing, illegible and hard to work out, as super smart and intelligent.

There's different kinds of intelligence, though. Nolan's thing is cleverness, neat little constructions for the viewer to figure out. This is intrinsically quite shallow, but otoh puzzle boxes can be quite fun to figure out, it's not the worst thing to throw into your average blockbuster. Obviously it says nothing about the human condition, would tend to agree with deems Nolan basically has no soul, or at any rate no interest in including it in his films.

No soul but lots of guilt. I'd never thought to look up his religious background but at a guess I googled "Christopher Nolan" "lapsed Catholic," and bingo.

people read confusing, illegible and hard to work out, as super smart and intelligent.

heard some people doing this recently re:the bad dialogue mixing in his films and it drove me nuts, going like "hey the guys an ambitious genius, so what if you can't make out what the actors are saying?"

I figure the bad dialogue mixing (which I, er, hear in lots of films I see in the theatre) is related to the dim/dark/dull visuals of a lot of films, another trend, but I'm not sure why either is a thing, exactly, or what is gained by those choices.

I think Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight will outlive any questions concerning the director's status as an auteur.

with Nolan, its just that he has some kind of hangup about ADR, so stubbornly insists on using on-set dialogue recordings no matter how compromised by Imax cameras that sound like riding lawnmowers. He's talked about using software to try and remove the camera noise without affecting the dialogue, with varying success. The reason the dialogue is decipherable in The Odyssey is just bc they finally invented a camera blimp big enough to dampen Imax cameras.

I don't think it's so much what he's saying but how he's saying it that frustrates.

Like, the whole visual grammar of The Dark Knight leaves me baffled.

Details that could be integral to the plot are shot so close-up that visual information is hidden off-camera somewhere.

We'll be shown a half-obscured newspaper cutting. But before we can even apprehend the headline we've cut to a close-up of a drill going through a wall. But before we can figure out what's happening here, suddenly we're in the Batcave. Then we're somewhere else - a luxury yacht for some reason(?) - and Bruce Wayne is diving into the sea and swimming towards a yacht and now he's in Hong Kong and now he's Batman standing on a roof somehow listening to Joker telling him clues (how!?) and he's setting up all these gadgets and he's flying around and smashing windows and disabling eight different bad guys who we're supposed to be able to tell apart but can't because we barely get to see them. And this is all happening in about 3-minutes while we cut to other characters' lives in various locations while people are mumbling under their breaths and interrupting each other with in-world jargon and semi-witty but mostly incomprehensible exposition.

It's exhausting. There's this rule-of-thumb in style guides that if you're making the reader feel stupid because they're not taking-in what they just read, you need to improve your writing. That should go for film making too. I shouldn't feel the need to rewind each scene to make sense of it.

You could have just as good a film if it wasn't absolutely CRAMMED with all these extraneous scenes. Settle down, Beavis, geez. Maybe you could make a bit more room for Ledger's Joker, who is great of course, but doesn't get near enough screentime. As for Harvey Dent, his transition to Two-Face is ridiculously abrupt. Isn't half the fun of a supervillain origin story that you get to see them change? Not just suddenly go "I'm a bad guy now"?

Anyway. I hope the Odyssey's good, lol.

xp I noticed several ADR moments in TDK.

I thought The Dark Knight an offensive movie and you can find my criticism hwee

Here

Where?

this old video does a good job of pointing out tdk's terrible editing: https://vimeo.com/28792404

Thanks for sharing that, dat

Yeah Dark Knight was shite, the culmination of many decades of turning Batman into a progressively less interesting character in the comics. Have no time for Ledger's Joker perf either tbh. Whole thing has nothing to say, just drowns in its self-importance.

how soon we forget Tim Burton’s Batman was supposed to be the “dark and gritty” reboot

I like Nolan ok but Tenant made me make an declaration that Malkmus once made about Smashing Pumpkins

and I saw Odyssey in the theater last night and it was really hard to hear dialogue sometimes so feel ppl on that

nolan’s an elegant bachelor?

To me reading this - I'm feeling flashbacks to The Dark Knight and Inception, two of the worst (imo) of the most lauded films I have ever seen.

With them for me it all comes back to the pounding, overwrought, dark, super-loud score, which obscures dialog and which seems juvenile and headache-inducing

This is a message board full of music people, I have to believe this has also bothered a lot of you

That said, regardless of the movies' other faults, I thought Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer kind of turned it down a bit, for which I'm grateful.

Too many related threads

I just finished rewatching The Dark Knight, which sucks anytime Heath Ledger is absent.

Batman looks goofy and his voice is so, so, so stupid.

It's been a while but I seem to remember enjoying Batman Begins a bit more?

Memento is a classic, I won’t stand in anyone else’s way saying the rest of his works are junk.

I’m guessing they were considered too up and coming but I would’ve thought the Safdie brothers should’ve made the list.

Batman Begins is the best of the Nolan Batman movies, it looks really good and is a much more cleanly directed film. It's an actually solid origin story, and I think the Murphy/Neeson/Wilkinson trifecta of villains works vv well. i think TDK is good but not as good as i thought back upon its release. it's just a big impressive freight train but it's not a really enjoyable movie to watch. BB is more fun.

The Dark Knight Rises is surely, Bane memes aside, the worst Nolan movie.

I like goofy Nolan— Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige. Dunkirk I found impossible to hate, the cinematography and score were just too jaw-dropping. The Dark Knight was whatever, …Rises was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I like when the guy succeeds! He seems like a stunted dorm room dude like what’s his name, the Pi guy— the films are dorm posters come to life! It’s for this reason Odyssey worked for me, it felt so silly and self-serious and sexless— like a dorm! I have fond memories of that stupid time of my life

https://i.ibb.co/yBXyz3JF/mick-jagger-smile.gif

The action set pieces in TDK are great, especially the semi flip. But inbetween those is soooo many scenes of people in suits blathering.

TDK is p good, know it's a minority opinion but it's a great comfort watch lol

Like it's totally brainless, full of it's self importance. Know the bat's voice is stupid but it's easily the high point of that trilogy and probably will always be the only set of Nolan films that I would watch if it's on TV...it's a lot better compared to Oppenheimer where you want something like the beginning of the Atomic age (humanity's best chance at self-destruction) being discussed and dramatised seriously and then it isn't...that's a far worse crime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joKDHHHXVSI

Oppenheimer probably is worse yes, but I have seen TDK and will never see that, so...

oppenheimer nightmare sequence is my favorite thing i've ever seen in a nolan film. the beginning of the atomic age isn't dramatised seriously?

Nope. It becomes a drama about whether his security clearance should be revoked or not, which I just don't care about.

I mean … that is the framing device but it’s not what the movie is “about.” I think the framing device is the weakest part of the movie too, but I wouldn’t say it is the point of the narrative.

I'll take Oppenheimer over most of Nolan's previous joints.

xp I think it spends too long on it.

A lot of the films feels like you are watching a documentary about successful project management, which is not without interest, but you can be forgiven for forgetting what they are building.

yeah, Oppenheimer doesn't expend his monologues and voice-overs for the sake of lamenting what a cost a denial of his security clearance would be; the quasi-hearing is the MacGuffin.

To a degree I admire how Nolan directed a box office smash that's almost entirely a montage.

i am not a film nerd but man i get strange feelings reading all the cineastes on this board saying good things about nolan. i don't see what makes him different from the dudes that direct all those crazy explosive marvel/DC movies, apart from his choice of subject matter. it seems obvious to me that he is really technically inept as a filmmaker, he doesn't have a discernable or interesting style, his movies are hard to follow and poorly edited. the "montage" like "effect", i attribute that to him just not being good enough to really pull a film together and have it cohere. i have nothing against awesome dumb action movies boilerplate or not but his stuff is just physically hard for me to watch idk.

he doesn't have a discernable or interesting style

I am in general Not A Fan, but I think his style is pretty discernible. Interesting is more debatable, for sure. Here and there, I'd say.

yeah mine is not a nuanced take, his style just seems hollywood boilerplate + technical overreach to me

Who else tries to direct a story with three storylines taking place in three different timeframes and have them coalesce (not just Dunkirk but the climax of Inception)?

Also, compare Insomnia to True Detective: Night Country to see what his strengths are.

yeah, i do in fact want to see Dunkirk from all the things i've heard, might watch it tomorrow to kill time before work. i did not enjoy Inception at all and iirc it sort of turned me off of thrilling blockbusters for awhile.

"who else etc etc" gimmicks

if he could not make the entire movie about his gimmick each time there'd be a lot fewer complaints

inception turns into absolute pish by the snow level, tenet is almost utterly unwatchable, most of his movies have at least two plotline too many and he has very little sense of balance of time for an audience imo

what he is -trying to do- somewhat palls as a positive marker against how badly it affects the end result

i am not a film nerd but man i get strange feelings reading all the cineastes on this board saying good things about nolan.

Well, consider that the cineastes on this board also overwhelmingly voted him the worst auteur of the 21st century. Since that is established consensus itt, it then becomes very tempting to dig up something good to say about him, in the defend the indefensible ILX tradition.

is Oppenheimer about the gimmick of Downey’s and Conti’s wigs

Discernable, even if not interesting.

You can make out what a Nolan film is, just in terms of self-importance, convoluted plotlines that fatten up the timelines, they feel expensively made and have a cast that have appeared in multiple of his films. They are often of the same flat quality, heavily male with the odd crumb thrown in other directions.

Sounds more like Villeneuve!

Other than the repetitive casting part

Good call in that I think Dune, Sicario share fairly similar qualities.

But Nolan might have created a (bad) style, idk.

Sounds more like Villeneuve!

― completely suited to the horny decadence (Capitaine Jay Vee), 23 July 2026 08:38 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

absolutely not

i am not a film nerd but man i get strange feelings reading all the cineastes on this board saying good things about nolan.

I've enjoyed much of Project Hail Mary, The Drama, Disclosure Day, The Devil Wears Prada 2 -- all mainstream box office hits. I like bits of The Odyssey. I guess I'm a cineaste?

it's really easy for me to think of the concept of "a nolan film" and for that to have very specific characteristics (massive scale + a concussive closeness to his actors, nonlinearity, a sense of humanism that is often split and forked and obscured by said narrative trickery), even the bad things about them (incomprehensible fight scene blocking), he's not some anonymous cgi slop marvel person

i wrote these nolan trademarks circa oppenheimer:

- award-winning actress used as an exposition dump (Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, TDKR, Inception)
- emotional woman who needs the presence of the male hero in order to survive (Inception, Tenet, probably TDKR but i forget most of that movie)
- blatant message statement in dialog that is not what is actually depicted in the rest of the film (all of them)
- temporal gimmick that adds little to the film, or may actually detract from it (everything except Insomnia)
- fence-sitting politics, bringing up controversial topics without coming to a conclusion on them (the Batmans, Man of Steel)

I forgot that Man of Steel was a Nolan/Snyder combo. No wonder I've never seen it.

emotional woman who needs the presence of the male hero in order to survive (Inception, Tenet, probably TDKR but i forget most of that movie)

Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer too.

i was also thinking of the Rebecca Hall character in The Prestige.

Odyssey switch up from "do you see the impact of violence? Look how it is has ruined this mans life and made him afraid to even go home?" to "fuck yeah lets stab all these bad dudes who were mean to a doggy!!!!!" was.... something.

Surprised y'all see so many films by directors you don't like! It's as if I somehow felt obligated to see every Darren Aronofsky or Hal Hartley film.

Odyssey switch up from "do you see the impact of violence? Look how it is has ruined this mans life and made him afraid to even go home?" to "fuck yeah lets stab all these bad dudes who were mean to a doggy!!!!!" was.... something.

It isn't a switch-up: the film wants both. The poem does too: it's laden with regret while the body count rises.

i have seen every emerald fennell movie despite knowing what i'm going to get when i see one (dull provocation). i will watch the next one. i kind of want her to surprise me

nolan has in fact surprised me. i had written him off after the batman films, but interstellar and oppenheimer were full of stirring imagery and ultimately moved me

(i agree the framing device of oppenheimer is the weakest part of the movie. but everything else about it was astonishing)

Wuthering Heights's old-fashioned sex rompin' was a surprise and made me anticipate her next one.

i just wish the fucking had been hot and not with everybody's clothes still on

and I have seen every Aronofsky and Hartley film.

aronofsky surprised me twice, with the fountain (drunk) and the wrestler (sober). absolutely loathe everything else he's done

The one Aronofsky I love is Noah, just the right kind of nutso energy for a Biblical epic.

reminding me i've never seen that one!!! and yeah it'd probably be on my deranged wavelength

I just realized I’ve been mixing up Interstellar with The Fountain for a long time.

Nolans that I like to some degree (like more than dislike), more or less in order:

Memento
The Prestige
The Odyssey
Oppenheimer
Dunkirk

It helps I think that four of the five had solid source material (books and/or historical events).

I wonder if losing his brother as co-writer has impaired his uh ear.

I’m surprised to see so many people like Memento. I watched it for the first time last year and thought it was some turn of the millennium “smart film for stupid people” a la Boondock Saints.

According to Letterboxd, I’ve seen 17 films by these 18 directors (three were Batman films, one was a Beatles documentary, the only films I’ve seen by Villeneuve are his Quebec films, and of the four Lanthimos, two were Greek and one was a short); I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch another one.

Memento's a good puzzle movie. Gimmicky, but I think it's fun. And I love Joe Pantoliano in it.

funny

I don't _feel_ drunk

any attempt to lump in with boondock saints is boring lookatme stuff

let's be clear, Boondock Saints is a stupid film for stupid people.

i finally saw Boondock Saints maybe a year or two and I can't even imagine my college era self finding anything redeeming about that one. that's an even dumber Fight Club.

aronofsky surprised me twice, with the fountain (drunk) and the wrestler (sober). absolutely loathe everything else he's done

Requiem... is on my "worst films ever made" list, and Pi is pretty close to it, but The Fountain is so strange and sad and ambitious and I absolutely adored it. I didn't hate Black Swan, me.

I need to watch it again, Dunkirk, but my memory of it was that it was one of the most jaw-dropping big ticket warfilms I've ever seen, that I spent the first half thinking "how did they doooo that" (about the score, especially), and the second half wondering about whether I enjoy to watch Barry Keoghan or do not enjoy to watch Barry Keoghan.

Pi is my favorite of his movies (I own it on DVD) but I haven't watched it in probably 20 years. I saw Requiem in theaters and will never watch a second of it again if I can help it. The Wrestler was a pile of shit. But The Fountain was really good, and Black Swan was fun.

yeah I liked Dunkirk a lot and it made me like Harry Styles

TIL Aranofsky directed The Whale; ah jeez

Bad result given some of the options listed.

That said, Dunkirk is one of the only movies I've ever found so loud it was painful to sit through.

Dunkirk had a continuous music score, but it wasn't super loud, dark, and overbearing like the scores in The Dark Knight or Inception

as far as Aronofsky goes, I liked Pi, Black Swan, Requiem For a Dream, The Wrestler (a little, not much), Mother!, and The Whale. Aranofsky showcases actors and actresses pretty well. He hasn't stepped too far wrong yet in my opinion

boondock saints is a straight up fedora of a film

one of the only movies I've ever found so loud it was painful to sit through

veterans of the actual Dunkirk evacuation said the film was much louder than the war itself

tom hardy-hearing

Rewatched Dunkirk last night and it was better than I remembered— although I retract my Barry Keoghan slander above, I’d mentally subbed him for that Fionn chappie—

The music isn’t artful but it’s daring, an incredible achievement— appalling to me too that the OST version allegedly omits many of the speed-ups— they weren’t recorded organically?—

I don’t know what to say except that bringing out a pile of ancient aircraft and filming them flying around is all I need to say “perfect cinema”— Nolan will never be referred to as “eminently quotable” but the drama of What He Does Visually is indelible— was reminded of Odyssey’s “let’s pack a bunch of men into a horse” kind of “what if?” filmmaking— really they should enlist Nolan to direct a Jack-Ass—

Good acting— moralization built into the story so Nolan didn’t have to waste any time writing any monologue, Churchill will do fine— all in all it’s Nolan’s best film and maybe my favourite war movie

Totally agree re Dunkirk

I struggled mightily with it the first time I saw it in the theater … it took another rewatch for me to grasp the structure, timewise; and then a whole third rewatch to fully enjoy it

And I don’t treat that as a knock on Nolan! it’s one of my favorite movies of his now

(Honestly it’s more revealing of my own dumbness lol)

My kid revealed last night that Dunkirk is one of his favorite movies, and he really likes Christopher Nolan. “His stories are not that conventionally told.” He did say Nolan isn’t his favorite filmmaker, he just appreciates what he does. Probably more than I do, but I’m not going to debate him.

Ya, I like the whole ticking clock motif in Dunkirk... the ticking in the soundtrack, and the way the timelines seemed to resemble the three hands of a clock (moving at different speeds and eventually converging).

I agree that Memento, which by nature ought to be disorienting

This was a minor theme in his early work - Memento of course, but Pacino is pretty shell-shocked by the end of Insomnia (for the titular reason) and the use of the Scarecrow in Batman Begins means that he can have three films in a row where the protagonist has to act decisively while very aware that they're working on partial information and busted instruments.

I mean, that's also me trying to watch Tenet, in fairness.

I will never watch Nolan's Insomnia obv but ffs the original didn't need any kind of remake

Maybe Nolan should remake Ben Hur next