25 Misfires From Otherwise Great Film Directors

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – April 22, 2018

Last week, we looked at 30 filmmakers who made only one well-reviewed movie over their entire careers. Today, we examine the opposite group: directors who have nearly flawless careers, with only a single misfire (with a Metascore of 60 or lower) standing in the way of a perfect record of all-green scores.

Note that we only looked at directors who have made at least five films since 1980.

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Alejandro González Iñárritu

The one misfire:
58 Biutiful (2010)

A winner of four Academy Awards, the Mexican filmmaker has averaged 74 for his six full-length features. Even the Spanish-language drama Biutiful, his sole film lacking approval from a consensus of reviewers, picked up a pair of Oscar nominations. Still, many critics found that Javier Bardem's lead performance was the film's only redeeming quality, with the story too excessively bleak to recommend it as a whole.

Everything else:
83 Amores Perros (2000)
70 21 Grams (2003)
69 Babel (2006)
88 Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
76 The Revenant (2015)

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