10 Best Films By 2013's Most Highly Praised Directors

2. Alexander Payne - Sideways

After making Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt -- all solid, but unexceptional dramas about average American schmucks making rather bad decisions -- Payne created an unforeseen masterpiece with his 2004 feature Sideways. The film chronicles one week in the lives of two college buddies, one a depressed intellectual and would-be writer, the other a washed-up lowbrow actor and soon-to-be-married horndog, as they take a trip to California wine country. What is intended as a good sendoff before marriage turns into a hilarious, touching trip as the two men become romantically involved with two women. Between one one of best movie laughs and some of the most poignant movie dialogue of the past ten years, something profound emerges. Payne, like David O. Russell, has an innate knack for human comedy, and for incisively mining the subtleties in human nature to find something sincere and heartfelt. He demonstrated this once again in The Descendants, another brilliant film, and the excellent but muted Nebraska. Instead of off-the-wall and crazy, Payne's characters are quieter, more introverted, tortured over many of the common traumas that life brings all of us. But just watch the scene between Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Maya (Virginia Madsen) in this movie, and you'll know Payne is, in his own wonderful and subdued way, a loving humanist.