Seeing the fav directors thread made me see that a lot of directors are "great" but in the case of some...they stopped being great a long time ago. Just wanted to see which Directors lost their "Great" status to youse guys....

For me...it's....*gasp*

Francis Ford Coppola, I love his work on The Godfather (parts I and II), The Conversation and Apocalypse Now..but...he really kinda lost his greatness for me. Like Apocalypse Now was his peak (this is debatable of course), and after that...he never really was that big again. And his films were mixed..and of course The Godfather Part III (which we can all agree sucked very bad)...Dracula, which I like but not love, never booted him further as one would think after a Dracula film would possibly do.

Coppola still has got it IMO.

Robert Zemeckis is my pick and the one who used to make enjoyable films and now makes utter shit. I sat frozen in agape horror/disgust as i watched the trailer for A Christmas Carol yesterday. It perplexing how something can cost over $100 million to make and look like it cost about $3.50 to make.

Tarantino.
Lay off the mj, Q.

I agree with Coppola. And I'd like to add William Friedkin. Last great film was "To Live and Die in L.A." back in '85.

Oliver Stone

/thread

Definitely Tarintino. He had so much potential after Jackie Brown, but the Kill Bill movies and Grindhouse were both disapointments. Id love to see him do more indie stuff like he originally started with. Not a fan of everything else. Is it just me, or are his lastest "homages" really starting to seem like blatant rip offs...

John Landis. He was never a great director to begin with, but he has made some genre classics. When the 80's ended, so did his talent.

Fixed

I would like to add:

Michael Cimino

Martin Scorsese
Wim Wenders

John Carpenter
Until Munich I would have put Steven Speilberg in this category
John McTiernan
John Woo

George Lucas?

If it wasn't for 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead' I would have said Sidney Lumet.

Ridley Scott

Kill Bill movies disappointments? Huh.. So much potential AFTER Jackie Brown? Not sure where that came from either.

Not 'great' directors, but at one time hot:

John Hughes (what's he doing nowadays?)

Jan De Bont

Renny Harlin

Barry Levinson

Philip Kaufman

Walter Hill

Brian DePalma

M Night Shyamalan

Harold Ramis

A lot of directors listed here aren't great directors. in fact, they're just one-hit-wonders.

Brian Singer for instance. Usual Suspects was one of the most well-made films around, wonderfully shot and acted, with great pacing. I've hated every single one of his movies since, because they failed in all those categories.

I'd put Scorsese up there, if only because he really hasn't tapped the kind of talent that he should. I felt like The Aviator, Gangs of New York, and The Departed would have been monumentally better if they had better casting. And his movies just don't have that cinema verite that they used to. I felt bored watching those movies, waiting for that Scorsese touch that made them unique.

John Carpenter -He had an amazing streak: Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, and Starman, and ten years later was doing movies like Village of the Damned, Vampries, and Ghosts of Mars.

John Woo and Dario Argento.

The two that come to mind are Coppola and Scorsese. They've had a few masterpieces each and now fall far short of that. Coppola has had a much bigger dropoff in quality, while Scorsese seems to have fallen into the Hollywood school of filmmaking.

Tarantino had major potential with Pulp Fiction, but only seems to be concerned with rehashing old films and ideas by homaging them and having the whole film rely on that. Not only does he NOT have anything original to say, he doesn't even have an original way of presenting those films.

John Hughes-Home Alone being a huge success was the worst thing that happened to this guy. He didn't direct, but after this all he did were kiddie movies. You would never be able to tell from his latter day stuff that this was the guy responsible for most 80s teen movies.

Peter Bogdanavich

William Friedkin

Francis Coppola- don't know if this counts, as he seems content doing little art-house movies no one cares about.

Richard Donner

I don't know if I would add Scorsese to the list. His movies are still worlds better than most of the crap we see, though I found "Bringing Out the Dead" pretentious. "Shutter Island" gives off a "Cape Fear" vibe of being a paint by the numbers thriller, though the book is quite good. However, I know that its ending is something that has been done many times before.

John Woo.

Joel Schumaker after Lost Boys.

Harold Ramis. I doubt he's going to replicate some of his most successful films. Year One really made me wonder if he's lost it for good.

Rob Reiner. There was a time his name on a movie made it an automatic must see for me, regardless of what it was about or who was in it. But he just isn't what he used to be.

Kevin Smith. He had a handful of great, funny, and inventive comedies and it seemed like he's been trying to copy those movies ever since.

According to his IMDB page, the last movie he directed was 1991's Curly Sue. It seems among a boat load of Beethoven movies, his most recent movie he's written was Drillbit Taylor.

But the man made some of the best comedies of the 80's that stand the test of time. Why did he stop directing so long ago?

Coppola was the first person to pop into my head.

Is it unfair to put Spielberg on this list? His last truly "great" movie was over ten years ago ("Saving Private Ryan"), but he's made enough "good" movies since then, I think, to probably keep him off this list.

Zemeckis is a great call. "Contact" was the last movie from him that I really enjoyed.