12 Directors Who Have Never Made A Bad Movie

7. Paul Thomas Anderson

Arthouse darling Paul Thomas Anderson has wowed critics with every release since he dropped Hard Eight in 1996, quickly going on to gain mainstream success thanks to the double bill of Boogie Nights and Magnolia soon after. The former of which Mark Wahlberg has since admitted he wished he never acted in, which means it must be good.

Later works in his career have refined the raw aggression that always lurked beneath the surface of his first movies, resulting in features which are difficult to totally grasp with one viewing, like the recently-nominated Phantom Thread or The Master, but that only makes them all even more impressive on subsequent rewatches.

Hell, PTA is so good that he even did the unthinkable back in 2002 with Punch Drunk Love: he made you realise that Adam Sandler can actually act.

Of course there have been blips here and there, with the erratic, drug-fuelled anarchy of Inherent Vice being viewed as an incomprehensible self-indulgent mess or a modern masterpiece depending on who you ask, but even that's still generally considered as being a flawed-if-ambitious experiment.