British film is on an all-time high right now, with the likes of Chris Nolan calling the shots in Hollywood's biggest blockbusters, old masters like Ridley Scott showing they've still got what it takes to cut it with the young guns and home-grown talents like Edgar Wright and Ben Wheatley continuing to surprise and delight. We thought it high time we found out who IGN readers consider their favourite working British director – check out our candidates below and vote in the poll at the bottom of the page.

Danny Boyle

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Kenneth Branagh

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Paul Greengrass

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Sam Mendes

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Christopher Nolan

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Guy Ritchie

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Ridley Scott

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Matthew Vaughn

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Ben Wheatley

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Edgar Wright

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David Yates

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There aren't many directors from these fair shores talented enough to qualify for a knighthood – and even fewer who'd turn it down. Boyle made Britain fall in love with itself all over again with his perfectly pitched Olympic opening ceremony, but his films have arguably done just as much to restore national pride: Trainspotting injected British film back into the American mainstream, Slumdog Millionaire took us all to the Oscars and Trance proved he can make a glossy Hollywood-style thriller without ever leaving these Isles of Wonder.One does not adapt Shakespeare lightly, but Kenneth Branagh got such a kick out of breathing new life into the Bard, he did it five times. Eventually shaking off his luvvie persona, Branagh proved himself one of Britain's most capable filmmakers with the fiendishly tricky Marvel origin story Thor – essentially a Shakespearian tragedy dressed in a big red cape. He'll direct and star in rebooted thriller Jack Ryan: we've no doubt he's able to make the words of Tom Clancy seem like poetry.The pioneer of the much-imitated 'shaky-cam' shooting technique, Paul Greengrass is way more than a director in need of a tripod. The Cambridge-educated filmmaker got his start on TV with incendiary dramas like The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence but hasn't mellowed with age; his final two Bourne movies even gave Bond a kick up the jacksie. There's no one able to better channel a movie's kinetic energy than Greengrass; watch United 93 for a reminder just how powerful a medium film can be in the right hands.The man behind the most successful British movie ever made, Skyfall saw Sam Mendes' stock rise so high, his Oscar success for the sublime American Beauty almost felt like a footnote. He'll join the elite club of directors who've bossed Bond more than once in 2015, but his place in the pantheon of great British directors is already assured, thanks to stunning genre pieces like the hugely underrated Road To Perdition and subversive war movie Jarhead.The most consistently entertaining and exciting director currently working in Hollywood, Nolan is currently out-Spielberging Spielberg and friends with a succession of mega-budget blockbusters and melon-twisting headscratchers. His Dark Knight trilogy is the superhero success story of the millennium, but his between-Batman films are arguably his finer works: The Prestige is as magical a character study as you'll see and Inception is one of the most breathtakingly original sci-fi blockbusters of the modern age.For a while it was easy to hate Guy Ritchie, but you can hardly blame the raft of cheap and nasty Lock Stock imitators for failing to live up to the high benchmark he set back in 1998. Since then he's matured into a filmmaker with the skills to match the swagger: Rocknrolla was the final word in British gangster cool, while Sherlock Holmes and its sequel saw Ritchie find his perfect mouthpiece in Robert Downey Jr. Guy is taking on Hollywood at their own game, but he's doing it his way.Alien. Blade Runner. Gladiator. Black Hawk Down. Ridley's body of work speaks for itself, but we'll sing his praises all the same. The 75-year-old director got his start with a Hovis advert but went on to make mindblowing blockbusters his bread and butter: no one fills a cinema quite like Scott. Even his misfires are fascinating for their flaws (Prometheus, Kingdom Of Heaven), but with Cormac McCarthy's eagerly anticipated crime drama The Counselor on the slate for 2013, Scott looks set to silence his few critics and add another classic to that stunning CV.It's the movies he hasn't directed that make Matthew Vaughn interesting: first he quit X-Men: The Last Stand, sensing momentum had left the franchise, then he backed out of massive Marvel movie Thor to make Kick-Ass on a much smaller budget. The man who effectively handed Daniel Craig 007's tux with Layer Cake has made a habit of making wise decisions, even ditching the directorial gig on X-Men: Days Of Future Past to make Mark Millar's The Secret Service – and history has a habit of proving him right.One of the most exciting emerging talents in British film, Ben Wheatley is an uncompromising director capable of constantly surprising his audience. Debut Down Terrance was a gangster movie on a council estate budget; Kill List was a thoroughly terrifying jaunt into some seriously dark headspace; Sightseers was Natural Born Killers with a thermos of tea and a twisted smile. And A Field In England ? We're still trying to work out what that was. No one does shock and awe quite like Mr Wheatley.The geeks will inherit the Earth, and Edgar Wright will be their saviour. A graduate of TV – Spaced was the most cine-literate sitcom to ever hit the small screen – Wright has forged a filmmaking style all of his own; the hyper-energetic Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is nothing less than his visual masterpiece. It was his 'Three Colours Cornetto' trilogy that endeared him to the nation, however, and with Shaun, Hot Fuzz and The World's End on his resume, Wright has three movies as funny as anything produced in the UK over the last decade.Taking Harry Potter over the finishing line was perhaps the toughest job in Hollywood: names like Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell had their fill of Hogwarts' middle chapters, but closing the book on JK Rowling's weighty tomes was a Herculean task. Thankfully, Yates was up to it, finally coaxing actual performances out of his young leads and raising the stakes to the point where even though Harry's fate was sealed in print long before he started shooting, Part II of The Deathly Hallows still felt like the final word. He's been quiet since Potter passed, but you'd have a break too if you'd just directed 50% of the most successful movie franchise ever made all by yourself.