On this very fine and quiet Monday morning, here’s an interesting time-waster: The finest 4-5 consecutive "great" movie streaks from directors.
The idea came to me after Francis Ford Coppola had four of his movies crack our 1970s critics poll. That’s something we have not seen in any of the other polls we conducted from the ’80s, ’90s, ‘00s, and 2010s.
It is impossible to find a director that has had more than 5 great movies in a row. Kubrick has done it. Coppola came close. So did Hitchcock. Terrence Malick (if you count the 20 years of inactivity in between).
If “Spartacus” does not count as a Kubrick-directed movie then his streak extends back to “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory.” That’s a streak of 8 consecutive great films, unheard of in film history.
Stanley Kubrick : Lolita , Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining (6)
Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now (4)
Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds (4)
Terrence Malick: Badlands, Days of Heaven … The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life (5)
Charlie Chaplin: The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator (5)
Michelangelo Antonioni: L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse, Red Dessert, Blow-Up (5)
Carl Theodore Dreyer: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet, Gertrud (5)
Andrei Tarkovsky: Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker (4)
Robert Bresson: The Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Trial of Joan of Arc, Au Hasard Balthazar, Mouchette (6)
In the modern era …
Paul Thomas Anderson: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, There Will be Blood, The Master (5)
Steven Soderbergh: Out of Sight, The Limey, Eric Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven (5)
Quentin Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill (4)
Wes Anderson: The Fantastic Mr Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs (4)
Alexander Payne: Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska (5)
Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne: Rosetta, The Son, L’Enfant, Lorna’s Silence, The Kid With a Bike, Two Days One Night (6)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century, Uncle Boonmee, Cemetery of Splendor, Memoria (5)
Martin Scorsese: Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, Hugo and The Wolf of Wall Street (6)