8. Miranda July
Best Film: Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) Miranda July is a modern polymath, she works as an actor, director, screenwriter, author, and (if you've seen her most recent film) a dancer. With only two feature-length films under her belt July has displayed a talent for making supremely vivid stories come to life with meager budgets. Words like "quirky" and "offbeat" are used to subtly deride her work as if establishing a distinctive style were a bad thing. None other than the late Roger Ebert referred to her feature debut Me and You and Everyone We Know as the fifth best film of the 2000s, and her long-awaited follow-up The Future didn't disappoint. Hopefully she will start making movies at a quicker pace, but she remains to be one of the brightest figures in the industry.