I'll just say 10 with my favorite film by each:

scorsese - taxi driver
tsukamoto - tokyo fist
miike - izo
lynch - wild at heart
fukui - pinnochio 964
ferrara - bad lieutenant
cronenberg - videodrome
leone - once upon a time in the west
henenlotter - brain damage
kaufman - class of nuke em high

Derek, I thought that "EWS" was horrible! I saw it in a cinema in Berlin in 1999 (when it came out, and was so bored, I ended up following the German subtitles instead. Mr Cruise and Ms Kidman had zero sexual chemistry, which pretty much ruined the entire raison d'etre of the film. And 3 hours??? Mein Gott, Christus weint!

I think eyes wide shut is one of the worst films ever made...

Yeah, Eyes Wide Shut is pretty terrible. I'm not a massive fan of Kubrick at the best of times but that really was awful. I suppose the fact that it wasn't properly finished excuses it a bit, but even so..

I like your list but I find this one difficult as it is a remake of a hong kong film called infernal affairs. i would have had kundun , casino or bringing out the dead in it's place but hey it is your list.

Aww, I loved Eyes Wide Shut, but I can understand why people don't like it.

My neighbour was one of the women in the orgy scene in that film. Never quite looked at her in the same light after that.

Derek: I believe there's a pretty good horror festival that happens in Edinburgh every year. Have you had a chance to check it out?

Is it this:
http://www.melies.org/festival.asp?ID=20

I hadn't heard of it till now. I'll need to go to it when I can figure out how to travel to Edinburgh cheaply (don't drive).

in no order,

anderson - boogie nights
gilliam - the fisher king
kubrick - the shining
tarantino - kill bill
spielberg - raiders of the lost ark
coen - raising arizona
fincher - fight club
scorcese - the departed
rodriguez - desperado

i cant think of a number ten so for now,

lucas - the phantom menace

where are the great female directors? streisand? that one with nolte is pretty good.

Inland Empire was the only Lynch fil I found to be tedious, and ultimately pointless. It basically was the third in the trilogy of his "women in trouble", behind mulholland drive and fire walk with me. but, after 8 watches, i still have no clue what the fuck it means. mulhlland drive was confusing, but when you figured it out, it was like wow, brilliance. i never got that epiphanie with inland empire (and how the fuck could you watch that movie for pure entertainment). fire walk with me is soooo underrated though. ive watched it thre days straght, and i really love it. i thought twin peaks as a whole was lynch's best work. bob/leland, the man from another place, the black lodge, all terifying ideas. and sheryl lee was amazing, especially for someone with no acting experience.

The film, Fires Walk with Me is really underrated I think. Probably because most people think of it as just a tv series spin off. But it really is a great movie. Definitely one of his best.

i'm speechless. in fact i'm not, but i'm going to hold back what i really think.

The fact that you chose that, and you're in your mid thirties. I dunno. I sort of don't know what to say. You were joking right. i mean please say you were.

one thing i will say about inland empire, laura dern, wow.

Movies are a visceral experience as well as an intellectual one. If it has a good story, that's great, but there are other reasons for watching them. For me, the plot in Mulholland was by far the worst part of the movie (after figuring it out on my own, discussing it with my friends, and then reading "official" explanations). It was just a desperate cry for meaning in an otherwise plotless idea. With Inland Empire, he unintentionally admitted that he was full of shit. And you know what, he still claimed there was some logic behind it. If you look hard enough at the stars, you'll see contellations. But there's really nothing between the stars. I watch Lynch for brilliant isolated scenes and sensory complexity, not a "good story".

Michael Haneke
Jörg Buttgereit
Akira Kurosawa
David Lynch
Sergej Eisenstein
John Carpenter
Samuel Fuller
David Cronenberg
Andrei Tarkovsky
Martin Scorcese
Pedro Almodóvar

etc, etc.

So many of my favorite movies are not representative of the director's overall body of work that I couldn't begin to do this.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is absolutely brilliant, but the other Nicholas Roeg movie I watched was incredibly cheesy and B quality.

Even with Kubrik, Felini, or Lynch I'd be stretching to pick 5 movies when I really only love three or four. I could probably pick 5 by Jarmusch and yet I would call him my favoriter director.

I did really like Inland Empire massively though. My wife is way more into Lynch than me, and she fell asleep during it, but I watched the whole thing and was spellbound. It struck me as the culmination of everything Lynch had done so far, and was incredibly funny towards the end. I can totally see why people would get bored with it, it just connected for me.

If you want to give Roeg another chance (well, if TV does...), I'd recommend Witches, a film for kids that is highly enjoyable and fresh. Far from his other work - and I liked Performance.

repressed demons, regret, hatred, fantasies, jealousy, those are meaningless ideas? you can have as many isolated scenes as you want, but if the story sucks than fuck it. lynch always has a good story to back up his work, with the exception of inland empire.