Auteur or Poseur?
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Welcome to the Directors Project.

The Directors Project is a long-term endeavor to catalog and rank all living and or working American directors. The project is an effort to update (but not supersede, nor override) Andrew Sarris's book The American Cinema. It is also an attempt to separate directors worthy of further research from those who, for whatever reason—a lack of true love of the art form, sheer mediocrity—are worthy only of this brief consideration.

Following are the current categories.

The Directors Project will take years, and much of the work is subject to evaluation and revaluation as directors come and go or continue to work, and we can say that it is our pleasure to think and sift through all these talented artists. Here are the current categories.

The greatest directors. They began working after 1971 (a semi-arbitrary starting point), and can expect to be placed in the Pantheon when the smoke clears.

Good to near-great directors who have given us thousands of hours of pleasure and much to think about.

Latest additions include Alan Rudolph.

Good, workman-like craftsmen. If the value of their work never excedes what was demanded of them, neither did they undermine their projects or fail them.

Latest additions include Harold Becker and Frank Darabont.

Actors turned directors, with all the glory and the drawbacks that implies.

Latest additions include Clint Eastwood and John Turturro.

Directors with reputations that far exceed their actual achievement.

Latest additions include Jane Campion.

Careers that burned bright, but brief, be it with three films or fifty.

European or Asian directors who moved here later in their careers, but whose filmographies are too bifurcated to thoroughly evaluate yet.

Directors destined always and only to make cable-access movies, regardless of which medium they intended their work.

Newcomers with potential.

One-shot wonders, painters-turned-directors, and other oddities.