Directors with whom I am not in tune

While I appreciate that certain films are well-crafted - Requiem, Wrestler, Swan - I just plain didn't like them: I made no emotional connection with them at all. The Fountain, of course, was pretentious rubbish. And who knows what on earth was going on with Noah?

I had great hopes for Zack Snyder - I liked both 300 and Watchmen. But as his career moves on it becomes more and more clear that, while he has an undoubted gift for putting eye-boggling visuals on screen, he should be kept well away from typewriter keyboards. Sucker Punch was adolescent tripe, and Man Of Steel changed, for the (much) worse, a character who had been perfectly fine for 75 years. He is a menace when writing his own material.

Ah, the Coen brothers. I can't say I haven't enjoyed any of their films, although I CAN say that I haven't enjoyed all of them. And what I really dislike is the feeling that the two of them are sitting in a corner, sniggering at a private joke to which I am not party.

See above

Having taken a number of fine Stephen King works and transformed them into audiovisual mush, his talents appear to be best suited to directing episodes of cookie cutter TV series. I hesitate to use the term "journeyman hack", but I just did. Plus he has a Very Bad Haircut.

Ridley Scott's early films annoyed me. Alien, Legend, Blade Runner all showed me that he was without compare at putting on screen realistic worlds I had never seen, but he was also very bad at storytelling - all three films were seriously flawed in terms of pacing and narrative. As this was perhaps due to studio interference I forgave him. A bit. Then came Robin Hood (the origin) and, oh merciful heavens, Prometheus, which looked great but forgot to make any sense at all.

I'm not 100% happy about adding Nolan to the list as I have enjoyed his films (while remaining aware of their faults: cold-bloodedness and bombast, to name but two). The reason he is here is because of the evangelism of those who sing his praises: it was a Batman film, not the Second Coming. And I deplore the Nolanisation of Superman - the very fact that "Nolanisation" has been coined as a neologism is enough to get my goat - although perhaps the responsibility for that lies towards the start of this list (Snyder, in case you're wondering).

Woody Allen, legendary humourist and darling of the intellectual classes, shifted from comedies to serious films. But his comedies (mostly) weren't funny and his serious films are peopled with characters who are not much fun to be around. Despite the fact that I have from time to time enjoyed some of his films (or, more accurately, parts of them), I remain largely without empathy for whatever is going on in his head.

Ah, Quentin effing Tarantino. A gifted screenwriter, a very able director, but unfortunately a man who is fatally chained to a number of major flaws, of which the main one is a belief in his own publicity which leads him to massive self-indulgence. A man who misunderstands "less is more" to mean "more is even more." And a taste for trash cinema doesn't mean that you have to use it to underwrite everything you do.

He seems to have a gift for making films which are badged as comedies but aren't. I find him smug, self-satisfied, and sour.

Another one with a devoted following who accuse you of being too stupid to understand if you find his films to be vacuous and tedious. A director for whom the expression "Emperor's New Clothes" would have had to be invented if it hadn't already existed. Sometimes an extended pause doesn't add dramatic value, it just screws up the pacing of your film.