Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books and popular culture. EW compiled this list of best directors in 1996.
1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Orson Welles
3. John Ford
4. Howard Hawkes
5. Martin Scorsese
6. Akira Kurosawa
7. Buster Keaton
8. Ingmar Bergman
9. Frank Capra
10. Federico Fellini
11. Steven Spielberg
12. Jean Renoir
13. John Huston
14. Luis Bunuel
15. D. W. Griffith
16. Ernst Lubitsch
17. Robert Altman
18. George Cukor
19. Woody Allen
20. Vincente Minnelli
21. Francis Ford Coppola
22. Michael Powell
23. Stanley Kubrick
24. Billy Wilder
25. Satyajit Ray
26. Roman Polanski
27. Francois Truffaut
28. Preston Sturges
29. Sergei Eisenstein
30. Fritz Lang
31. Jean-Luc Godard
32. Sam Peckinpah
33. F. W. Murnau
34. David Lean
35. Werner Herzog
36. Nicholas Ray
37. Josef Von Sternberg
38. Douglas Sirk
39. Max Ophuls
40. Louis Malle
41. Sergio Leone
42. Sidney Lumet
43. Oliver Stone
44. Bernardo Bertolucci
45. Jonathan Demme
46. Jacques Tati
47. Otto Preminger
48. Spike Lee
49. Tim Burton
50. Jerry Lewis