From The Master to Holy Motors, this autumn promises to be a strong season for director-led cinema. But who are the auteurs that are exciting us in 2012?

1 - Paul Thomas Anderson

Dillon Freasier and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Photo: Allstar

Though he's released only five films over a 16-year career, Paul Thomas Anderson has risen from promising young whiz-kid to Hollywood royalty with barely a bump along the way. As the scope of his work has tightened – from the sprawling ensembles of Boogie Nights and Magnolia through the intimate duologue of Punch-Drunk Love to the all-consuming solipsism of There Will Be Blood – so his dedication to his craft has intensified, with his disdain for PR and celebrity marking him out as the most devout film-maker of his generation (as well as the owner of one of Wikipedia's most glitz-free "personal life" sections). His upcoming film The Master, a controversial look at the birth of a cult not entirely dissimilar to the Church of Scientology, should make that title inarguable.

2 - Lynne Ramsay

Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin. Photo: Nicole Rivelli/Imagenet

When it was first announced that Lynne Ramsay was to direct an adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin, there were enormous sighs of relief all round: "It's in safe hands." And so it proved to be. Kevin was a heavenly marriage of the source material and its Glaswegian director's long-running preoccupations (kids, death, guilt), allied to her startling, hypnotic visual sense. Making her feature debut with 1999's hauntingly beautiful Ratcatcher (although a clutch of award-winning shorts preceded it), she's remained a critical darling ever since. Her forthcoming take on Moby Dick should be as powerful as it is personal. As Tilda Swinton says, "She's the real McCoy."

3 - Nicolas Winding Refn

Ryan Gosling in Drive. Photo: Rex

Like a patient zen archer, this is one film-maker who doesn't let fly until he's absolutely ready. Refn has made only nine films in 15 years but the end product is as singular as it is stunning. Refn's films look like nobody else's (although, admittedly, 2009's Valhalla Rising was pretty Malick-like). From his brutal Pusher trilogy to the weird and wonderful anti-biopic Bronson, these films are more like art installations, shimmering with stylish violence and near-hallucinatory moments. Last year's Drive suddenly made a whole lot of people remember his name, however. His next two projects also star Ryan Gosling: Thai boxing film Only God Forgives, and a remake of carousel-based 70s sci-fi Logan's Run. They will soon be sick of the sight of each other.

4 - Joss Whedon

Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans in Avengers Assemble. Photo: Zade Rosenthal

Joss Whedon's background as a writer/director of cult TV – Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, the short-lived Firefly – ensured a loyal following, which paid off with the rabidly successful (but only to a vocal minority) continuation of the latter series in Serenity, which marked his movie directorial debut in 2005. Since then, Whedon has pulled off the rare trick of turning niche popularity into blockbuster success, with films that appease fanboys and fangirls alike while maintaining serious box-office traction. This year, Whedon pulled off a rare one-two by delivering not just one of the year's biggest hits – Marvel's Avengers Assemble – but one of its best-reviewed counter-programming titles, the postmodern horror-comedy The Cabin In The Woods, which he wrote and produced. Though Avengers 2 is pencilled in for 2015, his micro-budget B&W Much Ado About Nothing adaptation, shot in his own house in eight days and starring Whedon favourites, is due first.

5 - Lars Von Trier

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia. Photo: Allstar

With his juvenile love of provocation, it's easy to forget that Lars von Trier is, first and foremost, a film-maker, and a truly remarkable one at that. In the past 10 years alone, he's turned out a nightmare-fuelling psychological horror, a shattering arthouse disaster movie, a fluffy Danish office comedy, an experimental documentary on the nature of creative endeavour and the first two parts of a trilogy about American culpability. His next project, The Nymphomaniac, is set to become the first film to feature both Shia LaBeouf and graphic scenes of unsimulated sex. No other director can straddle the arthouse/Hollywood divide with such audacity.

6 - Jason Reitman

Charlize Theron in Young Adult. Photo: Phillip V Caruso

Hollywood nepotism is a well-documented force for evil, inflicting upon the world horrors as wide-ranging as "rapper" Chet Haze (son of Tom Hanks) and Jaden Smith (son of Will). So Jason Reitman, offspring of Ghostbusters director Ivan, had his work cut out when he followed his father into the family business with the independent Big Tobacco satire Thank You For Smoking. In the seven years since, though, he's had four Oscar nominations and matured exponentially with each film, his efforts culminating in this year's devastating tragicomedy Young Adult, which furnished Charlize Theron with a career-best role as embittered ghostwriter Mavis Gary. Next, he directs Kate Winslet in Labor Day. Ivan "father of Jason" Reitman, by contrast, was last seen churning out the Ashton Kutcher vehicle No Strings Attached.

7 - Steve McQueen

Michael Fassbender in Shame. Photo: Rex

Making the jump from gallery artist to film-maker, Steve McQueen was expected to deliver provocative ideas with imagery to match. What few could foresee was his talent with actors, drawing a career-defining performance from Michael Fassbender in the IRA drama Hunger and following it with another in the sex-addiction story Shame. In the flesh, McQueen is straightforward, imposing and hates pretension. His films, despite their beautifully composed tableaux, follow a similar template. His first two dealt with willpower and the lack of it, in that order, and his next – 12 Years A Slave – reunites him with Fassbender alongside Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti and one Brad Pitt. The pressure will be on but don't expect McQueen to duck the issues on another hot-button movie.

8 - Leos Carax

Edith Scob in Holy Motors. Photo: Allstar

Alex Oscar Dupont – his working name is an anagram of the first two – came to prominence in the early-80s with the intimate, ultra-stylised romance Boy Meets Girl, and from there went the way of all auteurs, wasting time and money on long-gestating passion projects. His two films in the 1990s, Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf and Pola X, were respectively a hit and a miss, but his new film Holy Motors restored his crown as French cinema's arthouse counterpart to the mainstream Luc Besson. Often cryptic, sometimes boring, Carax nevertheless has a showman's touch, and though his films deal with navel-gazing issues – blocked artists are a recurring motif – it's hard to think of another film-maker whose work features hair-eating leprechauns, accordion blues solos and Kylie Minogue.

9 - Edgar Wright

Scott Pilgrim Vs The World

The two men and a dog who watched late-night 90s ITV comedy Asylum will have been alerted to his talents early on, but for the rest of us it was Spaced that first introduced us to Edgar Wright, as well as collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The trio successfully brought their reference-heavy humour to the big screen with zom-com Shaun Of The Dead and cop pastiche Hot Fuzz. Wright then went solo with Scott Pilgrim vs The World and 2013 promises to be busy as he reunites with Pegg and Frost for The World's End, then helms top-secret sci-fi film Collider, before starting work on his most high-profile feature to date, Marvel's Ant-Man.

10 - Andrea Arnold

Natalie Press in Red Road

A former children's TV presenter, Kent-born Andrea Arnold has not only overcome the commercial obstacles of a) being female and b) making non-genre British movies, she has done so on her own terms, creating an instantly recognisable brand of social realism. With her Oscar-winning short Wasp she drew a beautiful performance from Danny Dyer, with Red Road and Fish Tank she took Loach's improvisatory technique to new levels, and even with her one misfire, last year's Wuthering Heights, she proved herself radical in the face of traditional material. We eagerly await her next move.

And the rest...

11 - Steven Soderbergh

To move from male stripping in Magic Mike to pharmaceutical addiction in The Bitter Pill is classic Soderbergh. Still the least bracketable director in Hollywood.

12 - Quentin Tarantino

Inglourious Basterds dragged the arch stylist back towards critical and commercial esteem. Next up: slave drama/western Django Unchained.

13 - Lena Dunham

Director, writer, producer and just about everything else in between, Dunham made waves with debut feature Tiny Furniture, and HBO's much-talked-about series Girls.

14 - Christopher Nolan

The go-to director for the thinking person's blockbuster divided opinion with the The Dark Knight Rises, but still made a killing at the box office.

15 - Jacques Audiard

Now 60, Audiard has made two of the best thrillers of the past decade in The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet. Next is Rust & Bone, the story of a tortured love affair.

16 - JJ Abrams

Surely the busiest man in Hollywood, and indeed TV, production whiz Abrams returns to directing with a sequel to his massively fun reboot of Star Trek.

17 - David Fincher

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was not the undisputed smash that everyone expected, but Fincher remains Fincher, his ability to sustain tone and tension is still the model to which other directors aspire.

18 - Werner Herzog

The German master has been sticking to documentaries lately (cave drawings, death row, you name it). Next up, however, Queen Of The Desert – a biopic of 19th-century adventurer Gertrude Bell.

19 - Ben Wheatley

The queasy mix of the banal and the brutal in Kill List marked Wheatley as a potentially genre-redefining figure in horror. Sightseers will provide his take on black comedy.

20 - Mia Hansen-Løve

Her third feature, Goodbye First Love, confirmed the 31-year-old as having a rare ability to define mood and tone. She makes her leads look gorgeous, too.

21 - Gaspar Noé

Noé's segment in directorial megamix 7 Days In Havana proved a timely reminder of the talents of the man behind the dizzying, provocative Enter The Void.

22 - Terrence Malick

With last year's The Tree Of Life, Malick reignited the old visionary/pretentious debate. With at least two projects set for next year he's certainly upping his productivity.

23 - Gareth Edwards

With Monsters, Edwards reinvented a genre – and did it on a minuscule budget. Naturally, the next project he signed up for was the mega-money reboot of Godzilla.