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)

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).