1. Ingmar Bergman
2. Satyajit Ray
3. Alfred Hitchcock
4. Akira Kurosawa
5. Werner Herzog
6. Woody Allen
7. Luis Bunuel
8. Kenji Mizoguchi
9. Ming-liang Tsai
10. Francois Truffaut
11. Bela Tarr
12. Ritwik Ghatak
13. Aki Kaurismaki
14. Emir Kusturica
15. Krzysztof Kieslowski
16. Robert Bresson
17. Peter Greenaway
18. Pedro Almodovar
19. Wes Anderson
20. David Lynch
21. Terrence Malick
22. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
23. Roy Andersson
24. Anh Hung Tran
25. Orson Welles
26. Jacques Tati
27. Alain Resnais
28. Federico Fellini
29. Kon Ichikawa
30. Ermanno Olmi
31. Michael Powell (and Emeric Pressburger)
32. James Lee
33. Yasujiro Ozu
34. John Cassavetes
35. Wen Jiang
36. Mikhail Kalatozov
37. Douglas Sirk
38. Yimou Zhang
39. Stanley Kubrick
40. Stan Brakhage
41. Nobuhiko Obayashi
42. Martin Scorsese
43. Hiroshi Teshigahara
44. Anthony Mann
45. Mohsen Makhmalbaf
46. Abbas Kiarostami
47. Howard Hawks
48. Victor Erice
49. David Lean
50. Mikio Naruse
51. Michael Winterbottom
52. Masaki Kobayashi
53. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
54. John Brahm
55. Hayao Miyazaki
56. Anthony Asquith
57. Quentin Tarantino
58. Roman Polanski
59. Michelangelo Antonioni
60. Jacques Demy
61. Max Ophuls
62. Elia Kazan
63. Joel & Ethan Coen
64. Michael Haneke
65. Milos Forman
66. Frank Capra
67. Shohei Imamura
68. Buster Keaton
69. Louis Malle
70. Phil Karlson
71. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang
72. Carl Theodor Dreyer
73. Steven Soderbergh
74. Nicholas Ray
75. Agnes Varda
76. Fritz Lang
77. Sergio Leone
78. Francis Ford Coppola
79. Michael Curtiz
80. Otto Preminger
81. Carol Reed
82. Jean-Pierre Melville
83. Jacques Tourneur
84. Jules Dassin
85. Billy Wilder
86. Henry Hathaway
87. Robert Wise
88. Kar-Wai Wong
89. William Wyler
90. Takeshi Kitano
91. Jane Campion
92. Shunji Iwai
93. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
94. Andrei Tarkovsky
95. Jean Renoir
96. Leo McCarey
97. John Huston
98. George Cukor
99. Sergei Parajanov
100. Eric Rohmer
Notes:
* This was a difficult list. Top 2 are set in stone, 3-5 are fairly easy, as were 6-25. Out of the remaining names on the list, I picked 15 who I have a deep fondness for and put them at 26-40. 41-50 was some tough cherry-picking. For the other 50, I simply sorted by my average Criticker scores. This is a double-whammy, because it doesn't account for really good directors who I've seen a couple of stinkers by (Rohmer, for instance) or directors with a much larger body of work than the few favorites I've seen (Brahm). But after #50 I figured there wasn't much point in getting too fussy about it.
* Number of women: 2. Shame on me. Aparna Sen would have made it if her last film wasn't so terrible.
* Number of African-Americans: 0. Double shame on me. Spike Lee has directed two films I love (Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn) and a bunch that left me cold. If I discounted his shorts, Charles Burnett would be a good pick, but I don't feel that enthusiastic about him.
* The Dardennes might make this list after I see La Promesse.