2. Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick assured his own legacy as a "godly" director when he disappeared off the face of the Earth having made just two pictures in the '70s, the brilliant Badlands and the very, very good Days of Heaven. Given the critical success of those movies, and the unique way in which Malick wrote and directed them - dream-like; ethereal - and the fact that he went away for 20 years before returning to the realms of cinema made him into a big deal. The levels of hype associated with war film The Thin Red Line were massive, and though that picture split opinion upon release, it still ranks as one of his best films. Okay, so three pretty great movies, right? That's the sign of a talented filmmaker, isn't it? Maybe, maybe not. Since Red Line, Malick's work ethic has increased ten-fold, but the quality of his pictures has sagged and the man has only succeeded in exposing himself as one of the most pretentious directors working today. So much so, in fact, that his recent ventures - The Tree of Life, To The Wonder - have lessened the effect of his previous efforts. That might be a shallow way of looking at things, but the man has pushed his "style" so far in recent times that we've almost reached the point of self-parody. What is The Tree of Life, after all, if not a ponderous and ultimately overwrought exercise in self-satisfaction? It cannot be, after all, a movie made for public consummation, can it? Who has the patience for such a lumbering mess of ideas that amounts to such a purposeful but entirely lazy vagueness? And you can use those same descriptives to describe his follow-up, To The Wonder, which exists only as an example of Malick buying into his own legacy; the man has truly lost it.