Essentials by Director: John Woo 
The influence of Hong Kong director John Woo on action films cannot be overestimated; his admirers include Martin Scorsese, Sam Raimi, and Quentin Tarantino. After a mentorship under legendary chop socky director Chang Cheh, Woo exploded on the scene with the gangster epic A Better Tomorrow. His collaboration with leading man Chow Yun-Fat led to a string of action classics, including the ultra-stylish The Killer and the completely out-of-control Hard Boiled. Having since moved on to Hollywood, Woo continues to bring his trademark balletic gun battles and emotional depth to the action genre.
›Essentials by Director: John Woo Essentials by Director: Sam Peckinpah  Sam Peckinpah forever changed the way we look at action when he slowed the camera down and showed the real effects of violence in his 1969 breakthrough film, The Wild Bunch. Decades later, directors are still indebted to Peckinpah for his ideas about how to film violence and tell stories about men who have outlived their time.
›Essentials by Director: Sam Peckinpah Essentials by Director: Joel and Ethan Coen  Joel directs, Ethan produces, and they both write. That's the creative modus operandi of the Coen brothers from Minnesota. Experts at combining intricate plotting, outrageously quotable dialogue, and whimsical characters who could only exist in the Coens' bountiful imaginations, they make films as rich and rewarding as anyone else in modern American movies.
›Essentials by Director: Joel and Ethan Coen Essentials by Director: David Cronenberg  A brilliant but decidedly twisted filmmaker, David Cronenberg's penchant for the perverse has sent moviegoers running out of theaters in disgust and critics running to their word processors in awe. Starting off with cheapie horror films, Cronenberg made his name as the man who brought us an exploding head in the mind-reading thriller Scanners. That was just the beginning.
›Essentials by Director: David Cronenberg Essentials by Director: Federico Fellini  Few world-class filmmakers have done a more brilliant job of muddying the border between life and art than Federico Fellini. A former cartoonist and commercial artist, Fellini had a facility for rendering chapters from his own experience into images augmented by a passion for the circus and theater--his great 8 1/2 is about a filmmaker whose fragmented reality is polluted by pressures to pick a subject for his next movie.
›Essentials by Director: Federico Fellini Essentials by Director: Robert Rodriguez  A maverick among film directors, Robert Rodriguez marches to the rhythm of
his own maracas. Rather than working in Hollywood, Rodriguez's Troublemaker
Studios is based in Austin, Texas, where he directs, edits ("chops" is his
term), and scores the films himself. His El Mariachi (1998) was made on a
shoestring budget ($7,000), then remade as a major-studio film, Desperado.
Rodriguez's films are known for both quirky humor and stylish, balletic violence, qualities also present in the work of his friend and sometimes collaborator Quentin Tarantino. ›Essentials by Director: Robert Rodriguez |
