We have finally updated our best directors list! View the latest rankings here (as of July 2017).

The best directors since 2000

Which film directors have received the best reviews from professional critics over the past dozen years? That is the question we address below, where we rank the top directors since 2000 by average Metascore. Note that:

Only directors with at least four films released in the U.S. since January 1, 2000 were considered. (All release years listed below are U.S. dates.)

released in the U.S. since January 1, 2000 were considered. (All release years listed below are U.S. dates.) A film must have at least seven reviews from critics to be eligible.

Documentaries, direct-to-video titles, and multi-director anthologies are excluded.

The director scores are averages of their individual film Metascores prior to rounding.

1. Laurent Cantet

Average Score: 82.8 for 4 films

France's Laurent Cantet has directed just four films in his career, but they have all been hits with the critic community. The Class, his most recent film, was nominated for the foreign language Oscar, and won the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Up next for the director is a segment in the upcoming Spanish-language anthology film 7 Days in Havana, and a new film, Foxfire, based on Joyce Carol Oates' 1950s-set novel Foxfire: Confessions Of A Girl Gang. Both are due in 2012, and the latter film, like The Class before it, finds Cantet working with a group of adolescents making their acting debuts.

"There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness." —Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Writing about Time Out Films:

78 Human Resources (2000)

88 Time Out (2002)

73 Heading South (2006)

92 The Class (2008)

2. Pedro Almodóvar

Average Score: 81.7 for 4 films

The veteran Spanish director looks likely to lose his lofty #2 ranking by the end of this week when the final reviews come in for his latest film, The Skin I Live In, which underwhelmed some critics at its Cannes debut earlier this year. That film reunites Almodóvar with star Antonio Banderas, who appeared in many of the director's early releases, but none since 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. While the latter film remains one of the director's best-known works (along with 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and 1999's Oscar-winning All About My Mother 87), Almodóvar's output over the past decade (until this week) has continued to impress reviewers, with his films also picking up numerous awards along the way (including an unexpected original screenplay Oscar for the Spanish-language Talk to Her, the first non-English-language film to win that honor).

"It's very difficult to mesh fantasy with reality, but with great charm and a light touch, Almodovar shows exactly how it should be done." —Ray Bennett, The Hollywood Reporter

Writing about Volver Films:

86 Talk to Her (2002)

81 Bad Education (2004)

84 Volver (2006)

76 Broken Embraces (2009)

3. Guy Maddin

Average Score: 81.1 for 5 films

Whether they are ballet-filled takes on the Dracula story, or psuedo-autobiographical tales of growing up in Winnipeg, Guy Maddin movies might be an acquired taste (and that acquisition will be helped if you are predisposed to liking surreal, hyper-stylized, black-and-white, silent melodramas), but critics continue to reward them with stellar reviews, and we can guarantee you won't see anything like them from any other director. Next up for the Canadian filmmaker is the crime drama Keyhole, which follows a gangster (Jason Patric) on a Ulysses-like odyssey ... through the rooms of a house.

4. Paul Greengrass

Average Score: 80.3 for 5 films

Known for his documentary-like style (especially his use of handheld cameras), Englishman Paul Greengrass has been directing films since the late 1980s, but his name didn't begin to register with moviegoers in the U.S. until the past decade, thanks to a string of impressive films. While his two Bourne movies were his biggest commercial hits, Greengrass wowed critics even more with a pair of films based on real events: the 9/11 tale United 93, and Bloody Sunday, based on the 1972 shootings in Northern Ireland. His last film, the Iraq-set thriller Green Zone, was a rare misfire, but expect him to bounce back with his next project, A Captain's Duty, a thriller about a 2009 Somali pirate attack (likely starring Tom Hanks).

5. Aleksandr Sokurov

Average Score: 79.9 for 4 films

The veteran Russian director made a name for himself on the international scene with his 2002 film Russian Ark, which used a single, unbroken, 96-minute shot that moved from room to room in the Hermitage Museum to tell 300 years of Russian history. Since then, Sokurov has been a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, though he debuted his newest film, Faust, at this year's Venice festival instead, where it won the Golden Lion as the festival's best film.

"In the hands of visionary filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, this simple material makes for a haunting drama about war, generational relationships and the human condition." —Walter Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle

Writing about Alexandra Films:

86 Russian Ark (2002)

64 Father and Son (2004)

85 Alexandra (2008)

85 The Sun (2009)

6. Hsiao-hsien Hou

Average Score: 79.7 for 4 films

Born in China, Hou is now known as one of Taiwan's top directors, though some of his best known films have been made in other countries (including Café Lumière in Japan and Flight of the Red Balloon in France). He has attracted an international following (at least among the film critic community) as well, and after being named the best director of the 1990s in a poll of leading critics, he has continued to earn raves for his more recent work, including 2008's poetic Balloon, which references the classic French short film (which you likely watched when you were a kid) to tell the story of a young boy, his mom, and his new caretaker.

7. Mike Leigh

Average Score: 79.6 for 4 films

English director Mike Leigh has been working in film and theater for forty years, earning critical acclaim for character-driven films like 1988's High Hopes, 1990's Life Is Sweet, 1993's Naked, and 1996's Secrets & Lies 91. In fact, if we had to choose, we'd probably pick the 1990s as his most productive decade, but the 21st century has also been good to Leigh, who has received five Oscar nominations (four for screenplay, one directing) since 2000.

8. Peter Jackson

Average Score: 79.3 for 5 films

While the 1980s and 1990s saw the New Zealand native helming low-budget horror films and black comedies—plus the critically acclaimed 1994 gem Heavenly Creatures—Jackson was little known outside of the art house and horror community. The past decade, of course, has been another story altogether. His three Lord of the Rings films earned nearly $3 billion worldwide in ticket sales alone, and earned Jackson a place in cinema history (and three Oscar trophies). A remake of King Kong ultimately proved to be another success, though his most recent film, an adaptation of the novel The Lovely Bones, was a rare commercial and critical dud. Next up for Jackson, of course, is a return to Middle-earth; the first of his two Hobbit films arrives on December 14, 2012.

9. Bahman Ghobadi

Average Score: 78.5 for 5 films

The Kurdish-Iranian director has spent much of his film career (which kicked off in earnest with his debut feature, 2000's A Time for Drunken Horses) depicting the lives of modern-day Kurds living in Iran and Iraq. Music is another key interest for the filmmaker; many of his films feature musicians as major characters, including his most recent work, No One Knows About Persian Cats, which centers on an Iranian rock band facing censorship in their home country. Ghobadi's next film, a political romance called Rhinos Season, is due in 2012; Monica Bellucci is set to star.

10. Fatih Akın *

Average Score: 77.6 for 4 films (* one additional film was unscored)

Born to Turkish parents in Germany, Fatih Akin has made all but one of his (German-language) feature films in the current century. The critics' apparent favorite, 2008's Edge of Heaven, appeared on numerous critic top 10 lists that year, and is often compared (favorably) to Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, which similarly intertwines multiple stories.

11. David Fincher

Average Score: 77.0 for 4 films

The first American director on our list, David Fincher got his start directing music videos for the likes of Madonna and George Michael, before moving into film with 1992's Alien 3. While we are still partial to his output during the 1990's—including Fight Club 66 and Seven65—Fincher received his first two career Oscar nominations for his two most recent films, including last year's hit The Social Network. His next project already has the makings of another runaway success: Fincher's take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo arrives in theaters on December 23. He is also one of the key figures behind Netflix's first original TV series, House of Cards, which is set to debut in 2012.

12. Claire Denis

Average Score: 75.7 for 6 films

It's almost shocking to see that red Metascore in Claire Denis' filmography; though some movie fans aren't fond of the French filmmaker's work, critics almost always are. (The existentialist horror of Trouble Every Day—complete with cannibalism—proved a tough sell, however.) Even with that black mark, she's the only female director to rank in our top 15, thanks to recent films like the Africa-set drama White Material and her minimalist character study 35 Shots of Rum.

13. Guillermo del Toro

Average Score: 75.6 for 5 films

The only director on our list working almost exclusively in the horror genre, Mexico's Guillermo del Toro has been impressing critics since his 1993 debut, Cronos 70. Since then, his best known films are the two Hellboy titles and the dark fantasy Pan's Labyrinth, which remains to this day the highest-scoring new film since Metacritic initiated coverage over a decade ago. Though del Toro backed out of directing the two Hobbit films, he remains credited as a co-screenwriter.

14. Robert Altman

Average Score: 75.4 for 4 films

After a career spanning six decades, the late Robert Altman directed his final four films in the early 2000s before his death in 2006. While these last films may not be representative of his finest work (think M*A*S*H, The Player, Nashville, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, among many others), their combined score is still high enough to land him on our list, thanks mainly to 2001's Oscar-nominated Gosford Park.

15. David Yates

Average Score: 75.2 for 4 films

The longtime English television director's feature film career consists of just four movies. But since those four films all start with the words "Harry Potter," that makes David Yates one of the more successful directors of the past decade. (The four Potter films not directed by Yates, by the way, averaged a slightly lower 72.5.) His next project, obviously, will find him tackling different material, though it may be another book adaptation: Stephen King's The Stand.

What about the worst directors?

Tomorrow, we'll return with a look at the worst directors from the past dozen years.

What do you think?

What directors working today do you admire the most? Do you think that any of the directors listed above are overrated? Let us know in the comments section below.