In my 10.09.21 writeup titled Is Paul Thomas Anderson Still The Current ‘Master’ of Cinema?, I listed who I considered to be the best active filmmakers working today within the American studio system. This all led to this my thinking about the 10 current giants of foreign cinema.
Some marquee Mexican directors you would expect to be on this list (Cuaron, del Toro, Inarittu) were actually eligible for the American one, since the “three amigos,” as they are called, work within the comfy confines of the U.S. studio system. Ditto Yorgios Lanthimos, whose last three projects have been American.
And so, after much thought, and deliberation with fellow film journalists, I’ve come to the conclusion that Michael Haneke is the current master of foreign-language film. Haneke’s style can be seen everywhere in modern-day cinema. His provocative films, filled with the utmost of cynicism, come to us in the form of an almost staged realism. Despite the morbid subject matters he tackles, there’s always a witty irony behind the darkness — a sort of wink and a nod to the audience that what they are watching is very much the constructions of a prankster director.
Michael Haneke
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Pedro Almodovar
Asghar Farhadi
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Mike Leigh
Lucrecia Martel
Claire Denis
Celine Sciamma
Bong Joon-ho
It was very hard to stop at 10. The state of foreign-language film is so bright that I had a shortlist of 50 names. I narrowed it down to the above 10, but painstakingly, and I’m already kicking myself for not including Lars von Trier, Lee Chang-dong, Lynne Ramsay, Jia Zhang-ke, Olivier Assayas, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Pawel Pawlikowski, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Jafar Panahi, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Christian Petzold, Mia Hansen-Løve, Andrea Arnold, Hou-Hsiao-Hsien, Kleber Mendonca Filho, Jacques Audiard, Ruben Ostlund, Cristian Mungiu, Jian Zhang-ke and Maren Ade.
The criteria for choosing this list: Reputation, quality of films, recent output, festival presence and, most importantly, influence. World cinema would be a very different place without paradigm shifters such as Haneke, Dardenne, and Farhadi (among others). Their styles have been copied to death by hundreds upon hundreds of directors all around the world.