12 Directors Who Have Never Made A Bad Movie

9. Denis Villeneuve

Blade Runner 2049 Ryan Gosling
Warner Bros.

One of the hottest directors working today (and coming off the back of dropping one of the best sequels of all time), Denis Villeneuve has been creating unappreciated masterpieces for years now, gaining attention with foreign-language epics like Polytechnique and Incendies before onto American-centric stories.

Arrival was the film to properly break him into the mainstream though, and received some rightly-deserved praise in 2016 for using a classic alien invasion tale to tell a deeply person story (although I'll never be over Amy Adams being robbed at the Academy Awards).

His previous movies before this were just as good, with Prisoners and Enemy gaining a dedicated following, while even Sicario, perhaps the shakiest Villeneuve has been since moving over to American cinema, ended up being a deliciously twisted spin on big-budget crime thrillers.

Admittedly, it hasn't been a totally perfect run, and the director's very early work is a bit rough and unrefined. His distinctive fingerprints are still present though, and through these early efforts you can see him slowly find his feet and settle on a vision that would eventually result in some of the best genre pieces of the past few decades.

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Josh has over 11 years of experience as a published writer, having worked nine of those years as a full-time content producer at WhatCulture. In that period he has created hundreds of articles, videos and podcast episodes for multiple WhatCulture channels, specialising in gaming, horror and film & TV. He now primarily works as a senior content producer and presenter on WhatCulture Gaming where he co-hosts the WhatCulture Gaming Podcast, a top 3 UK most listened to gaming podcast that he co-created in 2018. Over the years he has reviewed several high-profile gaming releases, covered industry events with on-site reporting, opined on breaking news, and even kicked off his interviewing career by chatting to childhood hero, Tommy Wiseau.