Muriel Award: Best Director
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds [136 points/20 votes]
“Sometimes, I don’t think Quentin Tarantino knows what he’s doing. Let me clarify – not that I think he’s incompetent or clueless, but rather that his movies seem to be so far removed from Hollywood’s leading irresistible forces, commercial calculation and political agendas. Instead, a pure Tarantino film like Inglourious Basterds seems to come completely from his own inner storytelling needs and passions – and in some ways, his own unique cinematic id, divorced from the internal censor that hampers so much artistic expression. Sometimes his instincts lead him too far astray from the audience (as with Death Proof) but when he’s on, he’s capable of crafting yarns in a way that few other working filmmakers would even attempt. A 2 ½ hour revisionist period thriller, with a cast mostly made of unknowns, consisting largely of conversations in French and German? Who else out there would NEED to make that movie, and who else could make it such a strangely compelling mix of pure, Hitchcockian suspense, DePalma-esque fury, and Three Stooges-esque comedy? Tarantino may be a pure cinema savant, unleashing his love affair on the screen for all of us to share, in all its wild glory.” - Jeff McMahon
Runners-up:
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker [128/22]
Joel & Ethan Coen, A Serious Man [75/13]
Wes Anderson, Fantastic Mr. Fox [57/11]
Olivier Assayas, Summer Hours [53/8]
