Your Top 10 All Time Directors

Bresson
Brakhage
Bergman
Dreyer
Tarkovsky
Tarr
Welles
Teshigahara
Paradjanov
Cassavetes

Tati
Rivette
Jia
Marker
Frampton
Cassavetes
Hitchcock
Jarmusch
Sturges
Godard

I gotta say, I just saw The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and the three Fritz Lang movies I've seen strike me in a much different way than any other movie I see from that era. A lot of the visuals in Mabuse freaked me out, and the actor who plays Mabuse (I think he's the inventor in Metropolis) is perfect and creepy. Obviously, there are some goofy pseudo-psychological things in it, too, but those don't really mar the experience for me. I haven't done any research on it, having just seen it, but I wonder how much of it is allegory for Germany at that time. I read an interview that Lang did with Peter Bogdonavich where he said he left Germany so that he wouldn't work on Nazi propaganda films whereas his wife stayed to work on said propaganda. I've also heard she influenced Lang to make his German films too melodramatic but I'm not sure how fair that is.

Satyricon creeps me out too, but for much, much different reasons.

The Coens
Fellini
Bunuel (the dinner-on-a-theater-stage scene in discreet charm is one of my very favorites in film)
Woody Allen (and I'm not even gonna be a snob and say 'Just the '70s stuff,' though that's basically what I mean)
Hawks
Wilder
Truffaut
Altman
Coppola (but did you see the short he did for New York Stories? Jesus)
Relatively indiscriminate pick of a younger director: Michel Gondry

Sofia Coppola
Woody Allen
Roman Polanski
Michel Gondry
Orson Welles
Robert Wiene
Elia Kazan
Billy Wilder
Coen Brothers
and Charlie Chaplin

I placed the iconoclastic choice at the top of the list for ease of reference. My number one pick, really, is Kazan. Then Wilder, then Welles, etc.

kiarostami
chaplin
godard
bresson
tati
cronenberg
fassbinder
cassavettes
bunuel
renoir