Happy Tuesday, dear readers! Each week, we’ll rank the top 10 films in a specific category. While we aim to tie these lists to big releases, that won’t always be the case. Our goal? For you to enjoy, share your own lists, and join in on a lively, friendly debate. This is an interactive space to build community here at The Contending.
No fancy intros, no long essays – just a category and a list. Sound good?
This weekend, the Directors Guild of America will award its 78th Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film prize. The DGA has been handing out honors since 1948, when Joseph L. Mankiewicz won the inaugural award for A Letter to Three Wives.
Per the DGA’s own assessment, its top honor has been a near-perfect barometer for the Academy Award for Best Director. That claim largely holds up. Only eight times in the award’s history has the DGA winner failed to repeat at the Oscars, most recently in 2019, when Sam Mendes (1917) won the DGA while Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) took the Oscar. You can venture over to their site to see where the Academy differed from the DGA in other years. The award is also a strong bellwether for Best Picture, as the DGA winner’s film has gone on to win the top Oscar in 76.6 percent of cases.
This year, Paul Thomas Anderson is widely expected to win for One Battle After Another, which would mark his first DGA victory following two prior nominations. The remaining nominees are Ryan Coogler (Sinners), Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), and Chloé Zhao (Hamnet). This is the first DGA nomination for Coogler and Safdie, and the second for both del Toro and Zhao, who previously won for The Shape of Water (2017) and Nomadland (2020), respectively, on their way to Oscar victories.
With directors in the spotlight this week, it felt like the right moment to step back and rank the ten greatest to ever do it. Awards can tell us who mattered in a given year; this list is about who still matters decades later.
10. Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes From a Marriage, Wild Strawberries)
9. John Ford (The Searchers, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Quiet Man)
8. Charlie Chaplin (City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, Limelight)
7. Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, Stalag 17)
6. Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru, Yojimbo, Ran)
5. Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Godfather Part Two, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Dracula)
4. Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street)
3. Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark)
2. Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, Rear Window, North by Northwest, The Birds)
1. Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Paths of Glory)
![Sending Up a Flare: The Water Cooler Survives ‘Send Help’ [VIDEO]](https://thecontending.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/SendHelp-75x75.png)
