Wes Anderson
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

From Bottle Rocket on up, Wes Anderson has proven himself to be perfectly in control of Wesland, that quirky cinematic country of one distinct style but various emotional states. With all the requisite awkward pauses, school-play aesthetic and absentee fatherhood, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou holds true to its pedigree. But it also closes in on something new — a revealing, un-ironic diversion into truly personal territory. The director unsurprisingly tosses off most of his biggest budget yet on boats, corny animation and Bowie covers in Portuguese, but he also rightly throws out some (not all) of his aloofness with a story about filmmaking, about the little guy doing it his way — for personal reasons — and driven to stay afloat no matter how many big expensive toys the other guys have. The film is a kick in the pants for those who thought The Royal Tenenbaums was funny only because Ben Stiller & sons wore matching tracksuits, and a treat for those who support the manifest destiny of Wesland. — Tony Nigro

Brad Bird
The Incredibles

Since day one, Pixar's CG cartoons have upheld a long-forgotten bastion of family entertainment: story. But apparently they needed Brad Bird to give them style. Successfully using (and abusing) the comic book aesthetic to tell the tale of why being different is necessary for a fulfilling life, Bird's The Incredibles is a big step in Pixar's continuing evolution. In any other hands the movie might have bordered on silly, but Bird's deft control over visuals, emotions and style lends the animation the kind of maturity usually reserved for early Disney shorts and the original Looney Tunes. Without a trace of condescension or pandering to kids or parents or anyone in-between, the movie is a true crowd-pleaser. Indeed, Bird's approach to blockbuster direction actually makes the whole appartus of going to the multiplex — from pre-show ads to Coca-Cola slides — pleasant. And that's a rare thing in Hollywood at a time when great directors can slack by on a bloated story about a rich pilot who likes to wash his hands. — Tony Nigro

Jim Jarmusch
Coffee and Cigarettes

Nominating Jarmusch for this movie is sort of like giving him a lifetime achievement nod — Coffee and Cigarettes basically spans his entire career. It's filmmaking stripped down to the basics and an impressive display of pure craft. It's also rewarding in its imperfections. Its hit-or-miss quality is exactly the point and lets Jarmusch revel in the little freedoms that short films offer. That he continues to make them says a lot about his dedication. — D.W. Young

Sam Raimi
Spider-Man 2

The much-abused entertainment journalism rule of thumb is that three instances make a trend, but there has to be something to the emergence of horror directors into the mainstream. Peter Jackson's road to Lord of the Rings and King Kong was made slick with zombie entrails. Alejandro Amenábar turned out chillers like Tesis, Abro Los Ojos (the basis for Vanilla Sky) and Nicole Kidman's The Others before knocking out the prototypical respectable foreign film: The Sea Inside, which asks whose life is Javier Bardem's, anyway? Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro has yet to deliver a non-genre work, but his elegiac ghost movie The Devil's Backbone delivered everything that arthouse-heads savor.

It's hard to say that any modern horror director has made a better run for respectability than Jackson, but Evil Dead director Sam Raimi has proven himself to be the real deal, a mainstream filmmaker with voice, versatility and panache. Unlike Jackson, whose least fantastic film still had an Orson Welles golem as a character, Raimi has delivered a series of solid studio entertainments, including a Kevin Costner baseball movie, a Sharon Stone western, a Cate Blanchett Southern Gothic and the sublime Treasure of the Sierra Madre redux A Simple Plan. None of this really suggested to anyone (other than his most slavish adherents) that he was the right man for the original Spider-Man, but it was a smash, and Spider-Man 2 tops it for quality. Perfectly attuned to the nuances of Alvin Sargent's crackerjack script and with a real gift for actors, Raimi keeps all the plates spinning, never letting the movie lapse into too much Marvel-comic wankery while still paying fealty to those four-color roots. — Sean Weitner

Steven Spielberg
The Terminal