Best film directors

Quentin Tarantino wins 59% of his duels and tops the Cinema ranking ahead of Stanley Kubrick.

Tarantino holds a 43-point lead over Kubrick, the sharpest gap at the summit of this ranking. The two titans command the field with 1364 and 1321 ELO points respectively, while Alfred Hitchcock secures third place with 1307 points. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg round out the top 5, both showing strong win rates of 59% and 62%. The podium reflects a certain consensus around directors who blend popular appeal with auteur status, though Hitchcock's presence reminds us that the classics still resonate. At the bottom, the ranking tells a different story: Luc Besson sits at rank 25 with 1000 ELO points and a 37% win rate across 333 duels, suggesting his polarizing style divides the community. Guy Ritchie and Terrence Malick occupy ranks 24 and 23, indicating that stylized genre work and meditative art cinema struggle to compete with the marquee names above.

This ranking draws on 4602 duels between 25 contenders, shaped by the preferences of 48 players. The results were updated on 11 October 2026, capturing a snapshot of collective taste as it stands today. The vote remains open: head to the Cinema TopList and cast your own duels to shift the hierarchy, champion an underdog or cement the frontrunners in place. Every match-up changes the field, and every voice counts in deciding who truly commands the director's chair.

Updated on October 11, 2026

How this ranking is computed

Every duel won lifts a contender and every loss drops them, by an amount that depends on the opponent's strength: beating the leader is worth more than beating the last. It is an ELO, the same principle as in chess. Duels are not drawn at random — an adaptive entropy sort puts the least predictable match-ups first, which settles the ranking far faster than a full round robin. A worldwide ranking is only published past 30 completed plays. Known limit: a contender who has faced few opponents keeps an approximate score, and the bottom of the table moves more than the podium.

How our rankings are made →